


Traitor's Throne

by Cluegirl



Category: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alchemy, Fantasy AU, M/M, Magic is just handwavy physics, Pining, Secret Identities, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:10:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over, the invaders are defeated, and the Avenger is dead.  A year later on, searching for absolution, Prince Anthony Stark makes a pilgrimage to where it all began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traitor's Throne

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the cap_im Reverse Big Bang. Inspired by dyingforheroism's [art](http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c40/hangrace/RBB3_1_s_zpsf6e1f969.jpg)

~*~

~* Before: Ironheight, University Archive. *~

~*~

"I know this wreck's got a volume or two of Cyresias and Agricola, Coulson," Anthony called, striding into the musty, shadow hung office. "I need the Prettiossissime Donum Dei, and all the Artephius you've got, and don't be coy with me, because I've just finished with that Trithemius you gave me last week, and it as good as says outright that Ironheight's archives have a copy-" the Prince stopped short, blinking. "Who the devil are you?" 

The boy at Coulson's desk only then looked up from the enormous book he'd been reading, and his thin, pretty face was set and hard and as welcoming as frost on funerary marble. He was dressed in a loose robe of rough blue cloth, something lumpen and wooly peeking up through the cowl about his rack-thin throat and shoulders. His hands were large upon the book's illuminated pages though, one long finger held squarely at his place just below the fanciful painting of a dragon -- the Avenger, to judge by the costly lapis blue and silver of the drawing. He scraped Prince Anthony up and then down with a scathing eye.

"Not Archivist Coulson," he answered after a moment, his voice just barely polite as the skeptical wintry sunlight glinted gold along his hair, and caught summer in his chilly eyes. "The books you're describing ought to be on the third floor, six shelves from the eastern stair, unless some selfish boor has taken them and neglected to bring them back to the archive, in which case they won't be." And then the boy turned back to his reading, a clear and silent dismissal.

Anthony barked a laugh, startled and strangely delighted at the rudeness. Apparently Baron Rhodes' warning about the brusque independence of the Rootless was true, for no native Ceresian of the settled valleys, trade towns, or bustling coastal cities would address a wealthy man so, even if he didn't know him for a Prince of the realm. Old, forgotten Ironheight's stealthy reclamation by the kingdom's wanderers was leading to some very peculiar, if refreshing, social standards in the ancient mountain city.

The boy -- perhaps not a boy truly, given the depth of his voice, and the steady poise in his raw-boned frame -- cut a glance with only his eyes at the sound. "What now," he bit out, not lifting his head. "A map?"

Anthony waved an airy hand, unable to resist toying with the man. "No, Archivist's boy, I need no map, given that _you_ know where the books are to be found. Go and fetch them for me, and I shall be on my way." He wanted to see if the man had height to match his thinness, or was as slight as a child all over. And perhaps a bit, he wished to examine the cut of that ugly blue cassock from behind, to see if it was as shapeless as it seemed, or might hint at what lay within. 

This time the boy did not look up, but an eyebrow crooked in scorn. "Have the nobles of Ceresia stopped schooling their sons that you cannot not read well enough to find the books yourself?"

"That I cannot -- Of course I can read!" Anthony returned with only a little outrage, certain now that the boy could not know him. Not even the bold, untamed Rootless would have dared speak to a Prince of the royal line so freely. It had been years since anybody but his kin had dared to insult him so, and there was a perverse spark in Anthony's breast that actually enjoyed the novelty. He folded his arms over his doublet and set his shoulder to the door with a meaning stare, which the boy pointedly ignored.

"Then take the lamp and find them yourself," he said. "I am reading."

Anthony laughed again, and pushed off the door. "No, I think _you_ will fetch them, Archivist's boy," he answered, brushing dust from his red velvet sleeve. "When you are finished 'reading', you may bring them to the Royal Palace. Someone there will direct you to the Prince's chambers when you arrive."

That won him a look at last; suspicious and annoyed, yet still not even tinted with awe. "The Prince's -"

"Chambers, yes," he said the words slow and clear. "It's where the Prince goes when he is not attending his princely duties." No need to point out that his princely duties consisted largely of losing himself in alchemy and tinkering, and not making so much of a scandal that King Gregory or Chancellor Stane couldn't ignore it. Ironheight was just about the perfect distance from Ceresia's capital to allow for that, no matter what kind of carousing, exploring, or exploding Anthony got up to... or how many deliciously outraged young ascetics he entertained himself with baiting. "And you might as well bring that crusty old book you're so engaged with as well," he told the man as he turned. "His Highness always finds mythology amusingly fantastical." 

Then he left the Archive, returned to his rooms and gave Jarvis instructions to arrange the suite for a 'noble visitor'; his best doublet laid out and brushed clean, new boots scoured to a shine, elegant wine brought up from the cellars, the little markets scoured for the makings of an elegant meal. The young monk's face, when he realized his impertinence had been offered to none other than the Crown Prince, and brother to the King would surely be _priceless_!

Save that the young monk never actually came that night. And in the morning a packet of old, dusty books were delivered to the guard house at the front gate by a brown waif of a child with wide eyes and sticky fingers. The only sign of the truant monk himself was the note tucked into the largest of the books, at the very page he'd been reading when Anthony had found him. Between the illumination of the Avenger destroying the Hydraen ship _Red Death_ in the skies above Mount Coronus, and the smaller drawing on the facing page, where the Paladin, his sword in shattered pieces, used his starred and gleaming shield to strike the head off the invader Prince himself.

 _"The books you want are gone, your Highness,"_ the note read in a looping, antique hand that was precise, elegant, and made Anthony think of cramped wrists and squinting hours by candlelight. _"I hope you find in these some small entertainment in their stead."_ Below that, there was the letter 'S', and a shape that could have been a star, or a strange kind of bat.

All of the books had been histories and fables about the Hydraen war, the Paladin, the Avenger, and the Icefall. Nothing newer or more relevant than a hundred years back, and not a scrap of useful information on the ancient alchemy that had helped Ceresia to _win_ the bloody war of course. Nor a single hint as to making, or maintaining the White Suns that had kept those great, ancient ships aloft in the first place. It was only Anthony's deep and abiding love of books for their own sake that stopped him burning the silly things in pure and perfect pique that morning. 

That, and some actual concern that Archivist Coulson might do him some very real harm if he dared damage them.

~*~

~* After; Mount Coronus, on the King's Way. *~

~*~

"Prince Anthony?!"

That was all the warning he got before a lithe, reedy figure dropped from the trees overhanging the road and landed in a deep crouch five feet from his pony's nose. 

Cursing as Dummy squealed and plunged, Anthony hauled on the reins with one hand while with the other he swept the Starkiller from its leaden sheath. The harness mules jangled and brayed behind them in the road, more annoyed by the interruption than alarmed by Dummy dancing in frantic circles. There was only laughter in the voice though, as Anthony wrenched his pony about to face the intruder once more.

"Leagues and miles, it IS you!" In a garish flicker, the youth ducked in low, snaring Dummy's bridle before he could rear again, and not seeming to notice the chiming howl of Anthony's sword rousing from its sleep in the sunlight. "You've come back," he laughed, and his face was a long teenaged year removed from familiar, but the shine in his brown eyes was all awe and delighted welcome. And thus did Anthony realize with a sick, grateful twist in his belly, that he knew the lad after all.

"Peter," he growled, flushed and chilled with relief. "You little fool, what were you thinking, leaping out at me so? I might have killed you!" He dropped the reins, needing both shaking hands to wrestle the sword, unwilling now it had been wakened, back into its sheath. "I might've _killed you_ ," he hissed again as the Starkiller slid home with a groan, and lead concealed its white fire.

The youth only grinned though, his narrow face a mix of cocksure teenaged bravado and implicit, worshipful, gut-wrenching trust. "Knew you'd not do me harm, sir," he said, stroking the pony's cheek to settle the beast. Dummy whuffled at the boy's shoulder in response, shamelessly searching for hidden treats since Peter was apparently not hungry for pony at that very moment.

"Well _I_ knew nothing of the sort," Anthony grumbled, scraping the battered hat from his head and letting the thin mountain sunlight warm the sweat from his brow. " _I_ very nearly took your foolish head off before I knew it even _was_ you, lad. And what would I have told your aunt then? 'So sorry, Oma Parker, but I took your young nephew for a brigand on the road and killed him. Still, if it's any consolation, here's his skull; perhaps it'll do you for a flowerpot'?"

Peter, curse him, threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, I'd 'ave ducked out the way if you hadn't known me," he promised, but before Anthony could argue the wholly illogical and irrelevant point, the young fool let go of Dummy's bridle and trotted up the road to the harness mules. Butterfingers and You had apparently begun considering turning back for their home stable since no one had hold of their lead ropes, but they'd hung the cart's wheels up against the embankment trying to get themselves turned around. "Why are you travelling alone though?" Peter called, catching Butterfingers' lead and tugging him rightwise again. "Where's your castellan? Your servants? Why do the Knights of the Shield not attend you on the road?"

The mules grumbled and balked as he curtailed their retreat, but they were no match for his teenaged enthusiasm, even at their most stubborn. Tony rather knew how they felt, actually. "The Knights of the Shield attend the Queen at Armarille City now," he answered. "I travel with no servants because I do not overly need to be served upon this journey, and my castellan is..." he swallowed, then reminded himself that it could have been so, so very different. "Lord Jarvis is recovering from his wounds. He would wish me to extend his regards to your aunt, however." Anthony put out his hand for the mules' ropes, proud to note that it did not shake at all. "Will you carry that message for me, Peter?"

"He is recovering?" Peter's charm flickered briefly away, becoming a canny, wary thing of sharp edges and brittle rage. "We thought perhaps he'd been killed when the Chancellor..."

"I know," Anthony said, crafting a reassuring smile out of the tangle of leftover rage and thwarted vengeance that surged in his breast at the reminder. "But Jarvis was more than a match for Chancellor Stane at his most crafty, it seems, for Obidiah Stane is dead; his treachery, his misrule, and his paternal line ended with him, but Edwin Jarvis lives on to nag me yet. Just not here, and not today," Anthony took the lead rope from Peter's hands with a yank. "Apparently that duty falls to you. Tell me, why have you taken to lurking in the trees like a spider instead of spending your time on better pursuits? You were learning alchemy when I left."

"I still study. But I'm on the Way Guard now," Peter said, straightening to Anthony's jab with a thrust of chin and chest. "It's my job to see who comes by this road, how many, how armed, and by whose colors." He pointed back to the rope, dangling like a great snake from the tree, as if it explained everything. "I've got lines and slips all the way up to the Bride's Watch, and I could get word back to the guard there before a fast horse could reach the Ditch Wall at a gallop."

Anthony blinked, sobered by the thought of guards and watches posted in the merry, open-handed city he'd found within Ironheight's walls five years ago, when he'd come up the mountain hunting his grandfather's lost alchemical secrets. But there had been so many strange, wonderful, and terrible things between that innocent place and the callow, shallow Prince who'd come to ruin himself there, and now. An invasion; assassinations, both attempted and successful; brigand armies, traitors, and legends flung out from the icy grip of history to take up arms for the Kingdom again. _And to die for it,_ a voice in his head murmured. _Again._

Anthony took a breath and told his awkward conscience to be silent. "And you know this for fact?" he asked to distract himself from the twist of guilty grief.

Peter nodded. "Done it more than once now. We still get raiders, sir, now the Knights ain't here no more, and some of 'em think they can take up where the Chancellor fell off; snatch the Rootless for slaves, and take Ironheight for their own again. But we don't let 'em." He patted his chest, where the strange, garish livery carved red wedges over blue in bold, striking lines. "We know the gift you gave us, Sir, when you told the Royals that the city was ours to keep, and they couldn't throw us out of it for making use of what they'd left to the icefall all those years ago. We Rootless know what it is to take care of what you're given, and to make it keep sound and long. We don't mean to let nobody take Ironheight away from us again."

Anthony swallowed against a different sort of tightness then, and reached down to flick a finger at the collar of Peter's jerkin. "And why on earth are you dressed like some rich idiot's clown?" he asked with a smirk to take the sting out.

"It's for our Paladins," Peter grinned back, eager and proud at once. Anthony felt his smirk curl up and die from the inside, but the boy didn't seem to notice. "Your Highness and the hero; Ironheight's own champions. Blue's for the old Paladin, red's for the new," he tipped a knowing glance at Anthony and smirked, then traced a finger over the strange black shatter pattern that graced his chest like a badge. "And a circle of shields for the hidden knights."

Anthony coughed, and told himself he was not blushing. "Looks more like a spider's web."

"Well, then it does," Peter shrugged, defiant. "But let any man who isn't Your Highness call us who wear the colours of Ironheight's Heroes 'clowns', and by the Crossroads, we'll teach him a joke that'll laugh him straight to death!" It would have been a stirring declaration, but Dummy had got tired of waiting in the road unfed, and decided he liked the odds of Peter's hair being tasty. To his credit, the boy did duck away as soon as he felt the pony lipping at his hair, but the resulting cowlick he took away from the close call did rather take the edge off his braggadocio.

"You need a better horse," Peter complained over Anthony's laughter, scraping his fingers through his hair and failing to right the disaster. 

"Or you need less hair," Anthony countered. "And I think Dummy needs to get back to work before he gets notions of taking over the kingdom and making sugar-bearing slaves of us all. So it's back into the trees with you, and on up the road with me, if I'm to make the city before nightfall."

Peter drew himself up with a shake of his head, looking entirely grown up, and heartbreakingly young at once. "But for your Highness, the road's empty as far south as Lakepointe Bridge today. Samuel sent a bird up from his watch there not half an hour ago to cry all clear. I can escort you into the city, like is proper." He said the word with a respect uncharacteristic of one raised by the fiercely independent Rootless clans, and Anthony realized with some discomfort that while the Paladin's return to life might have sparked that hero worship off in the boy, his own allegiance with the not-quite-so-mythical-as-everyone-thought hero clearly made Anthony Stark -- King Howard's spare heir, the wastrel prince, the royal rake, the lord high tinker and toymaker of Ceresia -- proxy enough for it. 

"And your brigands come only by way of the trade roads these days, do they?" He asked, hard-voiced as he shortened Dummy's reins and wrapped the mule's lead around his saddle horn. "One year's enough for Ironheight's folk to forget about the slaving raids and Stane's prison mines?" It was a cruel jab, and not a fair one at all, but it scraped the worship from Peter's face in a flash, and even as he regretted it, Anthony could not deny he was glad it was gone. The anger that replaced it itched less.

"No one's forgot," Peter said after a moment's glare. Then the canny look returned to his eyes, and he strode back up the road to vault onto You's back, asking neither mule nor prince for leave. "We patrol the mines ourselves, now the Stars are in the stone again. Our folk don't go missing anymore, and if they do, then we go and find 'em right smart, and thrash anyone as took them." Then he picked loose the knotted long reins from You's harness, and kicked the mule hard behind the girthstrap. He laid back his ears, but jostled into motion, and the cart's sudden rattle startled Dummy into a ridiculous sidelong dance in the road.

"And your watch post?" Anthony sighed his defeat as he brought the idiot pony around and got them both disentangled from the mules' ropes. "Who minds the road while you're following me along it?"

"Well, on the Kingdom Road there's One-Eye Summers, Steel Pete and his sister Yana, Kitty Quick, Lucky, and Old Logan, aside from me and Samuel." Peter took his victory with better grace than Anthony surrendered it, his voice smug rather than mean as he listed down the names. "Murdoch, Miss Wander, and her brother keep the Water Stair, and on the heights, we have the Storms, Ben the Grim and Thin Richard."

Anthony couldn't help rolling his eyes. "Fantastic..."

"And that's just the big roads," Peter went on, warming to his topic eagerly. "We mind every game trail and poacher's hole this face of the mountain these days. Everything below Tryskelion Citadel, we keep well in hand." 

Anthony couldn't help shivering a little to hear the ruin named, the bright May sunlight fading behind memories of rattling earth and breaking stone, the yowl of blinding crystals as they shattered like bombs all around, the rending shriek of steel and grinding gears as the Chancellor's petard hoisted them all nearly to their doom. "Why -" he swallowed hard, then tried for nonchalance again. "Why do you not patrol there as well?" he asked, thinking of the wealth of knowledge and equipment they'd been forced to abandon there in that desperate, scrambling escape, and also just a little, of the Monastery above the Citadel, high, icy and humble as it curled around the most precious thing Anthony had ever hoped for, had ever lost.

Peter gave him an airy glance, but if he read any trace of the pang that twisted through Anthony's broken chest then, he said nothing to it. He merely swatted a fly from the air and shrugged, saying, "The Knights of the Shield wouldn't like it if we did." 

But beneath the nonchalance, awe still lurked like a serpent.

~*~

~* Before: Armarille City, Office of the Royal Chancellor. *~

~*~

_Prince Anthony,_

_His Majesty your brother, who is much occupied at present with matters along the Kreeland and Skrullder borders, has bidden me reply to your note, and inform Your Highness that he cares not overmuch what you might entertain yourself with in the old ruin, so long as he need hear no lurid details of it in civilized places when he is trying to eat._

_He has likewise expressed some surprise to learn that the glacier has left anything of Ironheight at all. However, if you declare that the Palace Royal still stands, and you want it, then he instructs me to wish you joy of it, and to consult your own vaults for the means of doing it up, rather than to apply to him for money. Wars are costly things, after all, no matter whether one musters first to the battlefield, or second._

_As for myself, I am pleased to hear that your interest in alchemical history remains keen, and would remind you that once there was a stronghold near by the city, where the traitor knights were said to guard the old king's most deadly weapons and scientific treasures. Records and artefacts not seen since the Hydraen War, known now only in legend and fireside stories of loyal dragons and immortal, unkillable knights, but surely based in some kernel of fact. No doubt between the ice, and a hundred years' passage, these records and artefacts will all have suffered greatly, but still one cannot help a thrill of excitement to wonder what might our modern minds make of such wonders, could even a portion of them be found?_

_Do let me know, should you require aid or resources, Your Highness, for as you know, I have not nearly the time to pursue the arts and sciences that once I had, but still do I understand the siren lure of knowledge to keen minds such as ours. It would please me to be of use to you, my Prince, should you wish it - and the means be within my power – you have, as always, but to ask._

_To that end, do please keep on the company of servants I have sent bearing this note to you. They are all well experienced in the keeping of gentle households, from cook to chambermaid to coachman, and it should bring this old heart some great peace to know that your Highness is not reduced to hiring your help from amoungst the thieves, beggars, and vagrant flotsam of the kingdom that have, according to rumor, washed up to squat in the ruin like the weeds they are. I would not see you robbed or cheated, nor treated in any manner unbefitting your noble house and royal blood, my Prince._

_I remain your loyal and obedient servant in all things,_  
_Obadiah Stane,_  
_Chancellor to the Royal House of Stark._

~*~

~* After: Mount Coronus, Ditch Wall turning on the King's Way.*~

~*~

It was a long, long climb to Ironheight, the old royal road switching back at long, lazy intervals that added hours to the straight-line crow's flight. One could spot the city from the foothills; a scar of steep-sloping, dappled stone prowing up from dense, thick forest green. Around the walls, the brighter hues of terraced meadows and orchards peeked out through the forest like a lady's coy petticoats as the climb meandered at a pitch so courtly and sedate that no royal steed would dare so much as trip on its slope.

Dummy didn't count.

By air, the trip from Crescent Lake to Ironheight was a matter of two hours – three, if one pressed the lift-crystals quite hard and the wind was favorable. At mule speeds on the long, lazy switchback road, however, it bid fair to be a matter of dawn to well past dusk. Anthony, never good at coping with boredom, soon found himself grateful for Peter's company, as the lively boy sped the hours along in a steady stream of gossip, questions, and enthusiasm that left no room for brooding memories or fretful second guesses.

"And she's really the queen now? Queen Virginia her own self, not just mother of the King-To-Be?" Peter asked, excited and incredulous.

"It's the job she's been doing for years anyway," Anthony shrugged, shifting in his saddle and thinking wistfully of the airship he'd elected to leave behind at the lake house. That would have spared him the saddle sores, at least. "My brother was always more interested in playing soldiers and threatening his neighbors than in actually running the Kingdom's business, and my father before him was no better. That's how Stane got as far along as he did, you know, by leaving us Stark men to our whims and fancies while he ordered things to his liking." He sighed, tucking his hat down to shield his face from the lowering mountain sun. "Pepper – Queen Virginia's been the only royal in the House of Stark since my grandfather's time who's worth the metal set on her head."

"But _you_ won the war!" Peter cried. Anthony frowned, but the boy carried on, earnest and outraged. "It was you that lit the White Suns again, and woke the Stars in the stone. It was you that woke the Paladin from the ice, you said so when he returned to us. And it was you cleared the name of the Shield Knights, and led them against the Chancellor and the Chitauri both."

"The Paladin did that. I merely followed him." Anthony forced the truth in edgewise, and was ignored. 

"It was you that put the Chancellor's Black Sun to eclipse though! They all say it!"

"The Avenger was-"

"You are a hero Prince Anthony!" the boy shouted. "You saved the Rootless from slavery, and you saved Ironheight and the whole kingdom as well! What's this Queen done that's better than that?"

"Everything," Anthony sighed, realizing that the youth was years from understanding. "Ceresia is lucky to have a lion-heart like her on its throne, no matter her sex. Especially given the alternatives. The Council and Guilds realized the truth of it with much less of a fight than I'd expected, really, and even the Heirophant is supporting her legitimacy." And here he tipped a glare back at the boy. "So before you reject her claim to the throne, you might better know that it's her who convinced the Landed Council to honor my bargain with the Rootless, and to leave Ironheight city to your fellows. It'll be her order that keeps the private armies of the old clans from marching back up here once the rebuilding's far enough along to make it tempting, and making you fight for the city all over again."

Peter stiffened, and Anthony had to smirk as he watched the bluster kink back on itself and then die – the boy really was too clever by half. "Aye, they would, too," he pronounced grimly. "Them as have too much always do want to get the whole lot if they can lay hold of it." 

"Exactly so," Anthony agreed, but he wasn't thinking of ancestral properties, wealth or artefacts that had been buried in the Icefall all those years ago, he was thinking of a quiet smile, wry, shy, and merry, and of eyes that challenged him to earn their every regard. He was thinking of approval, and of love, and of hope that lay drowned in the great harbor of Armarille City, alongside an armada of invaders' ships, and a legend out of time. 

He gave himself a shake, tipped his hat down against the lowering mountain sun that, while not hot by his southern seaside standards, was still squintingly bright. It had gone awkward between them now, but it had been a year of silences like these for Anthony as the Royal Court struggled around the void where they'd grown used to finding their princely clown. He'd learned to expect it, and to pretend, at least, to ignore the weight of it as he watched yet another person wonder if, given everything, Prince Anthony could possibly be mad after all. A year later on, and he had still not thought of a way to answer that query to even his own satisfaction.

~*~

~* Before: Mount Coronus, the Monastery of the Brotherhood of St. Erskine. *~

~*~

"There is something wrong with you."

Anthony laughed, but only because the alternative of weeping like a child was too mortifying. "It's a flesh wound," he spat out the leather strap to growl over his shoulder. "It will heal."

The monk snorted. "Give or take infection. However-"

"Oh, you must mean the fist-sized diamond embedded in my chest then," Anthony went on, not shrill at all, thank you. "Well spotted, Brother Steven. I might've known your keen eyes would never miss such a niggling detail OW!"

"That is not a diamond," Steven replied, drawing the thread through Anthony's flesh without a trace of pity. "Nor would any learned man take it for one. Nor is it what I was speaking of. I suspect you might be mad."

Anthony hiked up on his elbow to glare, despite the aching pull. "Mad, you say?"

The monk gave him a mild frown, but nodded. "Mad. To judge by the scars on your chest, it's been but half a year since the White Sun lodged in you there."

"Five months," Anthony hissed, laying flat on the pallet as the needle descended toward his bloody arse again, so he wouldn't have to watch.

"I know of but a handful who might have survived such a wound for five days," Steven answered. "And yet instead of returning to your palace in the South, where there must surely be doctors and scholars and servants to help you recover from the wound, where do I find you two seasons later on but staging one-man raids on hill brigands."

"And you're welcome for it, monk. Perhaps next time I shall simply give them directions to the monastery and wish them luck of you – AHH! Mother of Stars, must you jab so?"

His answer was a tug on the meat of Anthony's arse by way of the thread running through it, and a tightening of the long fingers on his thigh. "If I'm to sew up this gash enough to let it heal, then yes, _Your Highness_ , I must jab so." And yet despite the tart reply, Anthony could feel the thumb of Steven's steadying hand brushing back and forth across the ridge of his hip, gentle, careful, and kind. "The brigands were not searching for the monastery," he added after a second. "They know better."

"Because monks are so very fierce," Anthony scoffed without much heat. He could feel himself beginning to shake now that the fight was behind him and his fiery humors began to cool into pain and exhaustion. 

Steven snorted a gentle laugh, and took another careful stitch. "Because we've nothing of any worth at the monastery save our books, and there's no one on the mountain who'd buy those saving ourselves." 

"They were slavers," Anthony bit out around his forearm.

Steven's hands stilled for a moment, so completely the monk might have been turned to steel by his words. But then he softened, drew the thread through the abused flesh again, and sighed. "I know. But Monks make terrible slaves; weak, bookish, educated, and always giving the other prisoners notions of hope and salvation. Very inconvenient," he tutted. "I rather think the brigands were searching for the old king's armory instead." He waited then, but Anthony kept his teeth closed, absolutely unwilling to reveal so much as a word, not even to the gentle man in whose bed he now lay bleeding.

After a moment, Steven took the hint, tied off his thread, and cut it clean with a neat, well-forged pair of shears, which he set in the hollow of Anthony's back by way of a hint to stay still. "All the same, it was valiant of you to fight them off," he allowed, humor lighting his voice as he reached for the tinctures and bandages on the bedside table. "Especially all on your own like that. Quite the hero you are, Prince of the Realm, even if you are somewhat mad."

"I had help," Anthony sighed as the stinging of the ointments faded into an echoing sort of ease where the pain had loomed large before.

"Yes, I saw your pack pony chewing on a tunic sleeve when I arrived in the meadow," Steven agreed, unspooling clean white cloth to lay across the wound. "He seems as mad as you, and as foolishly valiant."

"Dummy isn't foolish," Anthony replied with an exhausted grin. "As ponies go, he's a genius. Either that, or he's too thick headed to know when he ought to be running away." Steven snorted again, and Anthony pressed onward before the monk could make the obvious comparison. "There was another. A knight who came to my aid against them."

"A knight?" Steven's voice was just shy of open skepticism. "You do not mean the Baron?"

"No, I know Baron Rhodes' arms and manner of fighting," he answered, unable to muster more than peevishness now that the salves were lifting away the pain of his cut flank. "And the Baron would not have left me unconscious, with a field-dressed cut in a meadow full of corpses. Not without waiting to see that I woke first." He shivered, and Steven drew the thick woolen blankets up over him. "No, he was a stranger, this knight; Armed and armored to make a master smith weep. Colours blue and silver, like night and stars, and even at the royal tournaments in Armarille City, I have never seen his like in battle."

Steven tucked the blankets down over Anthony's shoulders, and with a final pat, stood from the bed. "Well, perhaps this stranger knight simply does not care for games of war when there are real villains abroad in the kingdom," he offered, turning toward the door before Anthony could glimpse his face. 

"Then perhaps," Anthony called before the monk could escape, "he is just as mad as I."

The thin face half-turned, showed only the slope of a cheek, the curve of an ear, the jut of a jaw; not enough to detect either a smile or a frown, but there was a strange laughter in Steven's voice as he answered, "Rest now, your Highness. I will return at terce with food, and cordial for your pains." And then in a whisper of woolen blue, he was gone.

~*~

~* After: Ironheight City, Parade Approach on the King's Way.*~

~*~

"Is the road to the Moon Gate still clear?" Anthony roused himself enough to ask.

Peter cut off his rambling description of the utter devastation of Hightown and the Hammer, Osborn, and Kane estates to cut him a baffled look. "The Moon Gate? I suppose, but that way's much longer. The Parade Gate will have us in quickest, sir."

Anthony rolled his eyes, a gesture more or less futile in the forest twilight, but comforting all the same. "And it will also be closed fast at this hour, so unless you've cut a sortie gate into the damned things, we'll not be getting in that way till morning. I'd hoped to sleep in a bed tonight, not on the damned parade meadow."

The boy's grin was too white, too knowing in the gloom. "Oh, you'll have a bed indeed, sir. The best in the city, as usual."

"Not the palace."

"Oh no, sir, not the palace. Remember how I told you the Baron doesn't let nobody in the ruins, not even to clear up or rebuild? No, we'll have you a proper rest when we get in, and they'll not have you waiting before the great doors for long, I promise you."

Anthony groaned, rubbing at his face and remembering that, though they'd not been challenged on the climb, according to Peter's list of Way Guardians along the royal road, they had most certainly been seen, and correctly identified. And Peter could not be the only warden with the means to get quick word to the city. "I want my _own_ bed," he grumbled, knowing it for futility. "In my own room, in my own house, not my grandfather's palace, and not the bed of some Rootless elder turned out to make room for me. And I want a bath, a fire, a quiet meal, and a very large drink, and that is _all_ I want, Peter, so..." He blinked and peered as they came at last out from under the trees, and the King's Way turned to make its final climb. "There. I told you the gates would be closed," he said, pointing to the looming wall.

Peter's grin did not so much as flicker when he slapped the reins along the mules' backs and jolted the cart quicker along the broad stone approach. Anthony thought for a moment about turning Dummy's head to the right, and making for the Moon Gate on his own, but then he discarded the notion – a fool could see that sneaking anonymously into Ironheight at this point would be impossible. He'd have better luck with it were he to open the crates on his mule cart, assemble his armor and airskid, and fly over the walls in a blaze of silvery white fire.

So he set his heels to Dummy's side, winning an equine grumble and a punishing trot for his efforts, and hurried to catch up to the boy. 

The blast of Black Sun's genesis hadn't reached this far down the city from the Palace and Hightown, so Ironheight's mighty walls stood intact, smooth and defiant to the gathering night, limned from behind by yellow firelight, and spotted with torches at regular intervals. Baron Rhodes' doing, most likely, and Anthony imagined that knocking the chaotic, freebooting Rootless into some vestige of his military order and discipline must have been a mighty trial for them all. He was almost sorry to have missed it.

Then as they drew nearer the gathering level, he began to see it. A vast, dark shape splashed across the mighty arch of stone, and at first Anthony took it for oil stain, scorched black in the darkness, but no. The brigand army had been let into Ironheight by the Chancellor's own hand, with neither need nor opportunity for siege fire like that. Nor, he began to realize, would the splash of boiling oil or burning pitch have wound up so very symmetrical... with streaks of silver picking out glimmering details as the torches along the guard walk began to converge upon the gate.

No, it was a dragon they had painted there upon the pale dappled stone. Anthony shifted in his saddle and quashed the urge to shiver. Blue as starry midnight, wings spread to frame the arch, roaring mouth filled with defiance and long silver teeth, eyes set with white paladin stone, radiant still with the energy that had flattened half the city. The painted Avenger spread his muscled claws wide above the arch, and as they drew near, Anthony could make out their gory prize – the left held a crimson helmet, its faceplate styled as a grinning skull, while the right held... well that could only be Chancellor Stane's face, no matter how stylized.

"It's very pretty," he called to Peter in a voice that was not strained or thin at all. "But the gates are, may I point out, still closed." 

He ought to have known better, truly.

No sooner had he spoken than three great lanterns full of blazing paladin stone un-shuttered below the arch and bathed the massive wooden doors in fiercely brilliant light. And there they were; the Paladin and the Prince, painted twenty times larger than life on the ancient stoneoak gates. The Paladin stood stern and commanding in his blue and silver armor, his shield braced between his feet so that the star caught the light of the lanterns and gave back its own gleam like a lance of white fire. He was broad and bold, and courage was etched deep into every line of him, and on the right side door in equal heroic poise stood Anthony, his armor scarlet and gold, the White Sun blazing from his chest, the Starkiller braced point down between his feet – a farcical match, though rendered with equal care and reverence. Carved into the wood, not just painted, Anthony realized as his throat cramped tight around a million unspoken things. Carved cunningly to work the door's iron bosses into the design; carved to set gleaming paladin stone into the wood on shield, sword, and breastplate; carved and shaped so that even in neglect, it would be decades before even the harsh mountain winters could blur them smooth again.

"Damnation," he managed, blinking hard. 

Then, because his was that sort of luck, after all, the great gates gave a squeal and a grind, and began to roll back, revealing a heaving mass of Rootless gathered just within, all armed with torches, lamps, and grinning, expectant faces. At the forefront stood a handful of the clan elders Anthony had dealt with upon his first moving in to Ironheight; old Xavier, his chair being carried by Big Coy and Red Kenzie; Thin Richard, with his best friend (or possibly lover, the rumors were never plain about those two) Ben the Grim looming like a mountain behind him; flighty, pretty, clever Jan Van with what looked like a new husband, and a grin that could light the sky; the faintly terrifying Mother Darkholme unsmiling but faintly amused; and there before them all, arms braced over his best doublet, scowling as if it was the only way he could keep himself from grinning, stood Baron James Rhodes.

"Damnation," Anthony growled again as within the gates, the crowd began to cheer.

~*~

~* Before: Ironheight City, Erskine Abbey guest house, the North Suite *~

~*~

"I had not known you planned to come today," Anthony said into his towel as he scrubbed water, soap, and the scent of the night before from his face. "Let alone so early. Weren't you meaning to go out to the nut orchards and see if any of the trees there still bore sound?"

"I had not meant to come here today," Brother Steven's voice came through the door, and bless the innocent fool, he even _sounded_ like a mortified blush underneath his disapproving bluster. "And certainly I did not mean to interrupt you and your... guests. Only Dummy got into the herbarium garden again this morning, and I needed to return him before he ate himself into a colic, and the order out of this winter's medicines."

Anthony couldn't help a grin, remembering the glimpse he'd had of the young monk's face before he'd fled the room, how bright and wide his eyes had been, how perfect and damp the startled O of his lips, how delicate the flush of blood in those thin, pale cheeks. He chose not to wonder aloud how returning a wayward pony to one's neighbor might necessitate walking into said neighbor's bedchamber at all, and instead he chose a shirt to drop over his head, and conceal what evidence of last night's sport that only time, and not soap and water, would fade. "What was the damage then?" He asked, examining his beard and deciding it could go another day or two before he summoned his barber. "We might send to the south for replacements if it's too bad."

"Sister Sharon will not be satisfied with another herbalist's work after all she has done to recover her grandmother's garden herself." There was a smile in Steven's voice now, wrapped around a fond sort of warning. "When I left she was still calculating the damage to the borage, coltsfoot, and raspberry canes, and muttering quite savagely to herself while she was about it, too."

"Thank you for the warning," Anthony replied, just slightly less contrite than he had been a moment before. "I'll be sure to walk wide of your admirer for awhile." Jealousy was not a pretty thing, but neither was Anthony's scarred chest, or his vanity, and he gave full accounting to them all without shame. 

Steven was waiting at his study desk when Anthony opened the bedroom door at last, idly flipping through the book he'd left on top last night before he'd taken himself down to the Blue Dragon for drink and company. The morning light caught early gold in his fine hair, and there was a lingering stain across the height of his cheeks as he perused the pages with studied nonchalance. Embarrassment? Interest? Rage? Excitement? Grippe? With the delicate, fiery tempered monk, any of them were possible.

"You still have this," Steven interrupted Anthony's reverie with a disapproving glance, and a nod at the book that, Anthony realized, was the same fanciful history Steven had been reading in the archive first they'd met – the one Anthony had spitefully demanded he bring to the palace just in order to deprive him of it. "It's been months since I sent you this. Why have you not returned it to the archives?"

"Because I have not finished with it," Anthony shrugged reaching past Steven's shoulder for two cups not too crusted, and turning to see whether there was any wine left in the pitcher. 

"Finished _what_ with it? You cannot even read Latverian, and we both know you did not really want the book in the first place!"

"Because I _can_ read Latverian, a little bit. Not so well as you, but enough to translate it with references. And I had not realized it was useful in the first place!"

"Useful, or merely amusing?"

"Oh, fie," Anthony growled, for the pitcher was empty, the wine was gone, they both were shouting, and his head still hurt, damn it all. "Look here," he said, flipping the pages back to find the heavy, illuminated page with the Avenger and Paladin painted on it. He tapped the painted parchment with a rough finger. "There. What is that meant to be?"

"The Paladin's shield, of course," Steven answered, not moving so much as an inch, though Anthony's superior bulk loomed over his shoulder, and his breath stirred his hair. 

"What's that _on_ it?"

The monk rolled his eyes. "A star," he answered as if to a simpleton.

"No, it is _not_ ," Anthony gave the image another fierce tap. "In manuscripts of this age, stars are drawn with six points, or with eight. _That_ , is a five pointed mullion with two hooked bars behind it. _That_ is the alchemical symbol for the White Sun!" He traced the symbol, so like, and yet so significantly different from every other drawing or illumination he had seen of the myth. "The Paladin has always been linked to the White Sun, Steven. Always. That is why I came to Ironheight in the first place, because the Paladin was _here_. Here he rose in my grandfather's time, here he fought, and here he fell, with the great Avenger his ally, and the White Sun upon his arms, and somehow they are all bloody _linked_!"

"Anthony, I-"

"No, don't you roll your eyes at me again," the Prince bit out. "You look there. And there again. That very symbol repeats seven times across the page between the Paladin, the Avenger, and the design of the border, and that is _significant!_!" It was only then, turning to glare, that he realized how close they were, how their breaths tangled in the narrow space between them until he caught his fast and held it; how he could feel the heat of Steven's face stroking against his like an invisible aura; how his gaze had to flick back and forth to hold both of the young monk's blue eyes. And it was only then that Anthony realized that he had pressed a hand against his own chest, and the barrage of crystals embedded there, cool and flickering through the thin linen of his shirt. 

Steven swallowed, glanced down, then aside, and then pointedly turned his face toward the book, either pretending not to notice the pull between them, or else offering Anthony an elegant aspect on the subtle arch of his throat and ear as he stared at the page. "All right," he said after a long, awkward second.

Anthony blinked and dropped his hand to his side. "All right?"

"Yes. All right. I will help you translate it." Steven sat down again, reaching for a wax tablet that Tony had half-filled with useless formulae, astronomical equations, and amusing, allegorical doodles of genitalia. 

"You will?" 

Steven glared. "I will not if you mean to waste my time in repeating as a query everything I say. But my Latverian is quite sound, and if I help you find what you are looking for, I can return Coulson his book before the poor man must come hunting you for it."

Anthony shivered and dragged a chair near, not liking the notion of the too calm, too mild archivist troubling himself to come and find where Anthony kept his books... and slept. "But your plans for the nut orchard?" he had to ask, not sounding _too_ hopeful.

And at last, Steven cracked the ghost of a smile, fleeting and bright as a clear day in winter, and took up a stylus. "Perhaps if we find quickly what you seek, we might take a light supper with us and examine the orchard together later. I'm told there are some interesting hybrids that have arisen while the place lay fallow. For now though, why do you not show me what notes you have taken so far?"

~*~

~* After: Ironheight Gaol – cum -- Provisional Council Chambers. *~

~*~

The dinner was held in the assembly hall of the old Ironheight jail, primarily on account of that being the only building left standing in the city with a large enough room for the Elders of the city, the Baron's servants, and the riot of merrymakers who would not be shaken off from the event to show Anthony their hospitality. From the look of the place though, it had already begun to take the place of the ruined Royal Palace and burnt-out High Court as Ironheight's seat of power.

All the bars had been struck from the prison's doors and high windows, and rich furnishings had been scavenged from the ruins of Hightown to soften the hall's forbidding lines with scratched and dented elegance. A dais with six massive chairs commanded the back wall against a fabulous, moth-eaten tapestry of the Great Avenger, but instead of a dock or council hall, the place had been set up for a revel of legendary proportions.

None of the tables lining the room's walls were of a height, nor did any three chairs match, nor the cushions and carpets slung about the open space in the middle. The dishes and serviceware were a riot of pattern, style and substance, though from what Anthony could see of the monogram, the Hammer estate had managed to provide enough silver for the entire gathering to use. Nobody had linen serviettes, but some had handkerchiefs, and everybody had sleeves, and the spicy roasted goat was rather splendid after a long day on the road. Anthony suspected Oma Parker's hand in the affair when Peter assigned himself as the Prince's valet for the evening, and proceeded to bring him the first and best of everything the Rootless folk's feast had to offer.

He was skeptical, early summer in the mountains being hardly a feast-of-plenty sort of time, but Anthony read in the faces of the assembled, Elder and wanderer alike, a furious sort of generosity that he knew better than to try and evade. Even Baron Rhodes had his most determined face on whenever he reached to pour more wine into Anthony's cup, as if daring him to try and refuse it. Which was ironic, given that in their past evenings together, James had chiefly worn that expression when he was trying to _stop_ the Prince from drinking.

"Your guard looks uncomfortable," Anthony noted over the sound of the fiddles tuning up, and those not yet fed into a stupor assembling to dance in the middle of the hall. He nodded toward the far doors, where four figures he had last seen in the black enameled armor of the Order of the Shield now stood, quiet and watchful in the livery of the House of Rhodes. "They're new, aren't they?" He didn't see why the knights, no longer fugitive now they held the new queen's favor, should need to pretend to be anything beyond what they were, but then again perhaps the habit of stealth had become too deeply ingrained over the decades of the Order of the Shield's disfavor to set aside now their star had risen once more.

James gave him a strange look and shook his head. "No, but I'm surprised you don't know them. They were all aboard the _Guardian_ , while she still flew, but as I recall, you were rarely out of the crystal hold when you deigned to go aloft on my ship."

Anthony couldn't help grinning. "Well, someone had to take an interest in the engines, Baron, and yours was one of the last of the old airships still able to fly. I owed it to science to understand exactly how she stayed aloft, you know."

"And yet oddly, disassembling the lift engines mid-flight to get at the crystals did not seem to help her stay aloft at all," James observed weightily.

"That was but once," Anthony insisted, laughing. "And in my defense, I thought I saw a rat within the housing. An enormous, white rat in doublet and hose," he went on when James glared, unimpressed. "With a tiny silver lorgnon on a chain 'round its neck. Very suspicious. It is possible I might have been somewhat drunk at the time."

Jan Van, shamelessly eavesdropping, and possibly somewhat drunk at that very moment, began to giggle. "Leagues and miles, Your Highness, I've cats with better sense! How DID you survive your wandering years?"

"Through the direct and frequent intervention of friends who knew better," Anthony replied immediately, with a toast in James' direction. "No other force could have kept my skin with soul within."

Farther down the table, Mother Darkholme snorted and curled her scarred lip in what passed, for her, as a smile. "I'd wager he owes a larger debt to the Luck of the Holy Fool," she said, and raised her glass.

"More reliable than the Grace of God, all told," Anthony agreed, raising his cup in reply as James' attempts to maintain a suitably stern visage collapsed into a knowing snicker. "The Holy Fool, and Sensible Friends!" he cried, and drank with the other Elders as the toast echoed down the hall in a hundred merry shouts.

"And speaking of the Queen," James murmured under the cacophony. "How did you leave her?" And there were a dozen questions stacked upon that one, each more thorny, more accusing than the last, but Anthony refused to rise to any of them. 

"Relieved," he shrugged. "And busy, as she prefers to be. Her household is preparing for the arrival of the Hierophant and his entourage for her coronation, and she is still negotiating with the Chitauri council for the ransom of their Prince and the other prisoners."

"And you have left her alone for that?"

He cut a sidelong glance and hooked an eyebrow. "She is hardly alone, James."

"It has been a decent interval since your brother's death-"

"Hence her coronation as queen in two months' time."

"An event which you should be overseeing."

"My part in it is done," Anthony fought his voice to a level, though he could not keep the steel from it. "It is an _abdication_ , James. I am not marrying my brother's wife! She does not require my hand and name to keep her crown, for I have given the crown – the sovereign rule of Ceresia to her!" 

The high table had gone silent, watchful, and so Anthony raised his voice and let the Elders all hear it plain, knowing the night demanded no less. "Queen Virginia will rule on her own merit, in her own right -- not as Queen Mother of the infant prince, nor Queen Bride of the old one. She will begin the Rites of Ascension on Midsummer's day -- an event to which both yourself, Baron Rhodes, and the Elders of Ironheight City are invited, I might add, though given that the Rites will proceed over the course of a month, Pep -- that is, Queen Virginia -- has said she understands if not all of you choose to attend. Cities do not run themselves, after all."

"This one does," Big Coy answered into the spreading silence before Xavier shushed him.

"Don't look so grim, Baron," Anthony urged, jostling his old friend's elbow. "How often is it that a prince who does not wish to be king might walk away from the ending of his dynasty with his head still upon his shoulders, knowing that the kingdom will flourish for it?" He finished his wine with a grin that felt hard and heavy at the corners.

James' brows drew down beneath its weight. "Your Highness, I do not believe-"

"And about that," Anthony cut him off, so that his voice rang from the rafters and startled the last flutterings within the hall to heedful silence. "I remain Prince Anthony only until Midsummer's Day, after which I need nevermore answer to the title, nor to any of the honors and graces that hang off the damned thing. I shall afterward be Anthony Stark, a wealthy madman of Ceresia, or possibly 'Lord Stark' if I cannot talk Her Majesty out of inflicting another title on me. And so we will all begin practicing for the event, and let me hear no more of princing and highnessing from this moment forward, if you please."

For a moment, the silence hung tightly about the hall, a thick, stunned thing. But then Thin Richard stood and reached his long arm down the table to fill up Anthony's cup once more. "That being the case, Stark, when may I expect the return of the crucible you borrowed from me last year?"

"Why as soon as I find it in the wreckage of my house, Richard," Anthony laughed, "or else buy you a finer replacement, but first I shall want my aludel and spirit lamp back from _you_." Which set Ben the Grim to laughter, and the earthen bellow of his mirth set off the rest of the hall, first to mirth and afterward back to the dancing that kingdom politics had so rudely interrupted. The attendants brought dishes of clotted cream, almonds, honey, and tart mountain berries to the high table, along with pale, sweet wine, and while Anthony busied himself with dessert, the Elders took up the debate of how many of them should go Armarille for the Coronation.

James, patient serpent that he was, bided his time in silence, waiting until Old Xavier and Mother Darkholme were sniping merrily back and forth before he leaned in close and quiet to say, "Why have you come, Anthony?"

He took the time to chew and swallow, then sipped his wine before shrugging an answer. "Message boy. Her Majesty could hardly expect the Rootless to trust a summons to Armarille coming by way of an anonymous herald, no matter his livery, or the arms upon the wax seals. They'd expect imprisonment at best for their unbidden salvage of Ironheight, and for their taking up arms to defend their claim now. But Virginia wishes to know them, and wishes them to know her, and she thought they might trust my promises better."

And it was all truth, too. Not a word of lie hid between the cracks, so it was not fair at all that James squinted his eyes and shook his head at once. "No. I can read you like the stars, _Your Highness._ If that were why you'd come, then you would not be sending these Elders to the capital, you would be escorting them there. But you're not going. You do not intend to be there to see your brother's wife, mother of your nephew, your own best friend ascensd to the throne _you have given her._ " He paused to shake his head, glare never wavering. "Midsummer's Day will see the coronation of the first sovereign queen since pagan times and you will not be there."

"I will not," Anthony admitted, and kept his gaze steady.

"And I want to know why."

"Because I have business elsewhere," he answered, resisting the urge to rub a hand over the crystals in his breastbone, to feel their rough geography through the lie of his embroidered jerkin, and take comfort from the cool pulse of energy seeping through the cloth. 

The Baron's eyes narrowed, and he leveled an accusing finger. "You're going up to the Citadel, aren't you?"

Anthony made his face shiningly innocent, and banked the conversation hard aport. "I have a gift for you, by the way," he said. "We found the _Guardian_ in the bay – I'm sure you were told of the salvage operation. She was swamped quite near the shore, and not too deep at all. Her lift engines, when they were hauled to land, turned out to be more or less intact, so I replaced the old crystals with some of the new White Suns from the battlefield, and rebuilt the engines, and some of the guidance mechanisms as well. I hope you don't mind."

"You hope I don't-" James looked like he could not decide whether to throttle Anthony, or weep at the joyful news.

"I had to leave all that at the workshop in the lake house though," he went on airily, ignoring his friend's gobsmacked expression. "The machinery was too heavy to bring up the mountain roads, and it seemed a waste of time to bring it aloft when you'll need to have the framing all done at the shipyards on the lake anyhow. You might very well have time to put the orders for your new mistress in on your way to the Coronation if you were to leave a few days early..."

And that seemed to decide the confusion. The Baron's face clouded over at once, and he showed his teeth. "You _are_ going up to the Citadel. You're going to try and find the armory again, and see what arms and devices you can pillage from the ruin, aren't you? That's why you want me and these Rootless clan leaders gone from the city for two months or more!"

Again, as before, the Baron's not-quiet-enough words threw a listening pall over the high table, and drew the wary eye of every Elder there. Anthony had to sigh at the utter failure of his attempted deflection.

"No," he stripped all humor and sport from his reply, reached out to catch James' hand and eye even as he spoke truth to them all. "No, I give you this solemn word upon my mother's royal line, James; whatever business might send me up the mountain whilst I am here at Ironheight, I promise you that I have not the slightest interest in the armory, or what it might contain."

"And your business up the mountain would be?" Mother Darkholme did not scruple to demand.

Anthony gave her the same level look and answered, "My own."

Xavier, too perceptive by half, gave Anthony a knowing look, and passed his sister another dish of berries and wine, as he picked up the thread of their earlier argument. "Well, if you do mean to come along to Armarille, Raven, we must find you some gowns that are not grey."

She turned her glare his way, where it settled in comfortably. "I look well enough in grey, Brother. I do not see why I should change my habit."

"My dear, your habit looks funereal! A coronation seems hardly the place for mourning dress. Now consider blue and gold, if you will... "

~*~

~* Before: Mount Coronus, an alpine meadow below the abandoned Leadenstar Mine *~

~*~

The fight was vicious, bloody, and very brief. Anthony let the lift crystals in his boots lower him gently to the rocky meadow as the Paladin knelt to wipe his blade clean on a fallen brigand's shirt. Twelve men littered the meadow, the last out of the company of thirty which had brought the _Guardian_ down, unaware of, and unprepared for Anthony's presence aboard the ship that day.

"Not common brigands, I think," he said, knocking his visor up with the butt of his arquebus before slotting the firearm into its holster across his back. 

"Not brigands at all," the Paladin lifted his own visor to reply, his face stern, and hardly sweaty despite the chase these men had run them before turning to fight. "That's good maille they're hiding beneath those ragged leathers. And look to their boots -- expensive, new, and all alike." He inspected the thrusting point of his sword in the low mountain light, and Anthony could see the bright glimmer where steel rings had cost the blade some of its keen edge.

"I was looking at their weapons, myself," Anthony replied, kicking the long barrel of a culverin from one corpse's lax hands. The match still smouldered in the lock though the strange, glimmering powder had spilled from its breech unburnt, and the smooth, spent paladinstone ball rolled free down the slope. "There. That's the stamp of the Stark Royal Armory," he said with a nod toward the gun. "And his is not the only one I saw on the field today. I'll wager we'll find the same when we reach the battery up there and examine the cannons they fired at the _Guardian_."

The Paladin scowled at the gun and slipped his sword into its sheath, his distaste for the firearm evident in every line of his handsome face. "No doubt we shall," he agreed, and bent to rifle the dead man's purse.

"What are you doing?" 

"Someone has armed these men against Ironheight," the Paladin answered, unruffled. "Have you a better way to find out who?"

Anthony did not, but nor was he particularly eager to stick his hands into the bloodied pockets of their foes. Still, he did not wish to seem overly delicate before the great hero -- whom he still could not quite get used to considering a living man rather than an overblown myth, no matter how often he turned up to the fight when Anthony battled the mountain's brigands. So he kept his disgust firmly behind his teeth, stripped his gauntlets off and went to do his own share of corpse-looting. 

"Ceresian coin and scrip," he announced when they reconvened to compare the findings. "And more armory marks on their other weapons as well."

"I found the same," the Paladin agreed, turning over the guns and knives Anthony had brought to add to the pile he'd assembled. "Moreover, all their boots fit. The armor could have been looted from some crown storehouse or barracks, but these boots are journeyman-work at least -- chosen carefully, and at some cost."

Anthony, who had never before considered not having boots that fit him, or how much they might cost, huffed uncomfortably. "From the gilding on his gun and blades, I make that fellow over there to have been the captain," he said and tumbled a pouch of glimmering spheres out onto the grass. "Though I have never seen shot like this before."

The Paladin scowled. "I have. When charged, it bursts with white fire upon impact, and can burn through armor in a second. In the war, I saw men half blasted away by the like. This gun he had..." he mused as Anthony stooped to recapture the shot.

"A common, if decorative, arquebus, thankfully," the Prince grinned. "He shot me twice during the fight, I'm sure of it, and here I remain...hello." 

"What is it?"

"Something sewn into the shot pouch," he answered, fetching out a small, sharp dagger.

"Orders?" The Paladin's voice was sharply eager, but Anthony shook his head.

"Not unless they are engraved upon a large coin," he replied as the slip of metal tumbled out into the light. "And that seems hardly an efficient use of time and resources, and devilishly hard to read on the move. No, this looks like some kind of seal." He held the tarnished silver up to the light and turned it back and forth to make out the markings. It was a kind of spiral with many hooked arms, as though it were spinning. Most of the branches ended in some kind of a flower bud, but every third split into two just at the end.

The Paladin hissed a strangled oath and stepped back. "Leave that," he bit out just as Anthony recognized the engraving with an excited lurch.

"No, I know this symbol," he declared, thrusting to his feet. "See here; if you take the split arms away, that leaves eight arms to the figure. Flip it around so the arms spin sunwise, and _that_ is the alchemist's symbol for the conjunction of red mercury and vitriol of iron! I need to consult my books, and maybe Brother Steven as well, to find out what the addition of the split arms might mean, and thereby where it came from." He turned the disc in his hand, enthralled. "It is not the Green Lion, clearly, nor the White Sun, nor the Gravid Queen. Those are all simpler than this. Nor is it any base element I know, though it might possibly stand for-"

"The Hydra."

"What?" Anthony blinked.

"They are not split arms, they are spawning heads -- two from where any one was cut." Anthony swallowed, immediately seeing biting serpent's heads where flower buds had been. "The arms of Imperial Hydrae marked every ship and shield, and every soldier's goods," the Paladin said. "I could not forget that mark in a hundred lifetimes, waking or sleeping."

"But..." Anthony shook loose of the dread with a jolt. "The Hydraen Empire is no more," he said. "The Red Sun laid waste to the land when the... when you and the Avenger forced the Prince's _Red Death_ to ground on the mountain's lee side. It's said that for years, when the wind blew from the north, it brought bitter ash and burning rain with it from the wastelands. What little of the empire survived has been picked clean between Latveria and Skrullder ever since." 

The Paladin gave a step, clearly stricken. "I... The ship was... I knew that... they told me the Red Sun would have-"

"They told you truly," Anthony answered, puzzled at the reaction. "Where the White Sun lifts base matter to flight, and may-" he patted his breastplate's glowing centerpiece with a smirk, "grant a strange sort of life to certain undeserving tinkers, in twisting the White to Red, they created a weapon such as none had seen before... nor blessedly, since. All record of the process expired with the madmen who created it." He stepped close, set a careful hand to the Paladin's shoulder -- an empty gesture, since the armor surely blocked out any sense of the comforting touch, but he gave it all the same. 

"They crafted their own doom, meaning to unleash it upon Ceresia, but you saved us. You won the war, and-"

"No." The Paladin shook off Anthony's hand with a growl. "Schmidt was a despot and a madman, and meant to make all the world his province. I do not regret his army's defeat, nor the destruction of his damned weapon, but the _nation,_ " he gritted, shaking his head hard, as though the idea burned in his head. "The whole of that people -- peasants, teachers, parents, artists, alchemists and scholars, they did not deserve such a fate!"

"And it doesn't fall to you that they got it," Anthony insisted, catching hold of his shoulder again. "Their blood is on the Prince's hands -- his and his alchemists, not-" He stopped short as the Paladin's gauntleted hand closed around his, leather rough against his knuckles, enameled plates gleaming smooth. Anthony let the Hydraen seal slip from his fingers without contest, dazzled at how the blue of the hero's eyes so closely matched that of his armor.

"Thank you, my Prince," the Paladin said, not sounding one whit less unnerved, merely as if he wished to stop the comfort short. "I will..." He looked away with a sigh, and the strange spell between them broke. "Your friend and his crew must be wondering where you are by now," he said as Anthony stepped away, palms rubbing. "Perhaps he will be wanting your aid to determine if the ship is to fly again. I am told you are gifted with machines."

"Yes, but all this-"

"I will take what we have found to the Abbot," he answered, and bent to begin scooping the lot together, securing the smaller things in pouches along his belt, tucking blades and guns through straps on his gear. "And I will see to it that your friend gets a look at... at this before I go."

"Wait, before you go _where_?"

But as usual, the Paladin entertained no such question. "I will keep this if I may," he said, brandishing the seal between two fingers as he turned away. It hadn't been a question, and so Anthony did not bother with an answer. Instead, he jammed his own fingers -- tingling with cold, not touch, thank you -- into his gauntlets, and squaring his weight over the lift crystals in his boots as his armor began to rise.

True to the Paladin's prediction, he found the _Guardian_ able to fly -- barely, with poor altitude, worse attitude, and steering that did not so much answer, as ignore half of what was said and talk back spitefully to the rest. But the grand old girl was aloft, and as such she could be set to rights again once the Baron limped her along back to Crescent Lake for a refit.

And so, of course, by the time Anthony returned from escorting the crippled ship to her berth, the Paladin had long since left the monastery. The Abbot and his assistants were cloistered at prayer, or claimed to be, but the kitchens mustered up a warm meal for Anthony all the same, and directed him to the scriptorium if he wished to wait.

Anthony did not wish to wait, but he looked into the low, golden room all the same, past all the bent backs and twitching goosefeathers scratching along parchment rolls and pages. He was not surprised to spy Steven's slight form in the farthest corner, the lamplight striking brilliant along his hair as he pored over a volume of modern history, a precisely rendered sketch of the Hydraen coin tucked carefully under the edge of his book.

~*~

~* After; Ironheight, Erskine Abbey guest house, Parlour *~

~*~

"I can go," the doctor said, his gaze flicking about the sitting room with such a weary furtiveness that Anthony just knew he was already packing in his head.

"No, and no, and no," he declared, hauling the man, shorter and thicker than he, but thankfully less determined, back to the fireside and the after dinner morsel Anthony's unexpected arrival had disturbed. "You mayn't leave. Mustn't, in fact. Do you realize how long Ironheight's needed a proper doctor? A proper hospital? The monks did their best, but now you're here, you simply may not pack up and go just because one wastrel tinker comes wandering back to the doorstep."

"But the house, at least," Banner's arm took in the space around them, low and cozy, and smelling of lamp spirits, charcoal and drying herbs. "This was yours before I came, and-"

"And it was mine purely by way of my having moved into it and set up housekeeping in the absence of anybody else being here to complain about it," Anthony insisted, sitting in one of the chairs, and stealing a sliver of pear from the small plate. "That's how owning a home seems to work in this city, and may I point out, it's pretty much what you did as well, Doctor. And given that I've been comfortably settled in royal palaces of one sort or another for the entire time, I see no reason to cry foul of it." 

"But-"

"And I will not hear more argument, sir. I am glad you are here at Erskine Abbey, and I feel certain that the - the monks would have been pleased to see the fine hospital you have made out of their herbarium, dormitory and chapel." He was still sober enough to be more than a little bit proud of how his voice did not waver at the mention. 

The doctor blushed and ducked his head as he reclaimed his own seat. "I had worried, I will admit. There are places I have seen in my travels where a scholar tending to the gross physical needs of the gross physical masses upon consecrated ground, and using medicine rather than faith to do it, would be decried as blasphemous."

"Not in Ironheight," Anthony said, stealing more fruit. He was not hungry after the feast, but there was something in the accepting of this man's hospitality (even though it had not been precisely offered) that seemed to set the evening's tone to an easy one. "And not among the Rootless. And that is why you must stay -- not just in the city, but in the Abbey and this very house as well. I shall be glad to accept house room of you for awhile if your conscience bids you to offer it, but the truth of matters is that you want the Abbey for a far better purpose than ever I did, and I will not take it from you."

"If I...?" The doctor plucked the spectacles from his nose and shook his head, chuckling. "Of course you'll stay. I can hardly send you up to sleep in the ruins of the palace, after all."

Anthony grinned, for he always had liked getting his own way of things. "Well, you could do, but I'll confess it, I'm glad you don't mean to. I've missed my laboratory here rather terribly since I left."

"It is a fine laboratory," Banner allowed, skeptically amused. "But surely not the equal of what you must have at Armarille, or even what had been in the Palace here."

"It is the equal. Superior by far, in fact," Anthony replied, before realizing that he could not quite bear to explain why antique equipment and moth eaten, barely legible, cryptic notes and records had been precious to him. Not because of what they were, but because of whom they had touched, and what miracles they had created. He was not drunk enough for the truth of that to slip past his guard yet. "But the library, as I am certain you've noticed, is very nearly the bigger prize to this house. I do not know what kept the vermin from it while the icefall held the city hostage, but I bless my luck that it did so. Only the great Archive in the University quarter is larger, or in better repair." He hesitated, recalling the devastation of Hightown. "Or it was..."

Banner nodded, understanding, as only another scholar could, the ache he could not keep from his voice then. "I understand that the Archive was the first of the buildings to be excavated after the battle," he said. "They are working to rebuild it inasmuch as they can -- they are not masons or architects, these Rootless folk, but they are game to work and have a sound idea of what will stand fast and not fall over, at least. And thanks to the Archive, they have plenty of written instructions on the making of mortar and the laying of stone walls. It might look strange, but the University quarter will be reclaimed before winter, I think, and the Archive bids fair to be the very first door reopened in the place."

And why that news should make Anthony's eyes blur and sting, he did not care to consider too deeply, let alone explain to his new friend. So he thrust up out of the chair and turned to inspect the drawings the doctor had pinned about the walls of the room. Dragons, each and every one; tinted sketches in the anatomist, naturalist, and draughtsman's fashions along with clumsier, more stylized renderings copied from ancient books, sculptures and mosiacs; scribbled landscapes of caves, lakes, ravines and mountains with reams of habitat notes in the margins; detailed drawings of wings, claws, bones, eyes, organs, spines and scales, all notated in a close set, precisely legible hand. 

Anthony squinted close at one rather fanciful drawing of the Great Avenger swatting the _Red Death_ from the sky with its mighty tail, and smiled. "You're from Culver, aren't you, Doctor? I thought I heard just a bit of it in your accent."

"Not by birth, though I took my schooling there."

"I thought so. The drawings especially give you away -- Culver's anatomists are beyond compare in the world." 

"Or were," the doctor murmured, which was true enough. The island nation had made much of its neutrality while its mainland peers squabbled between themselves over borders, beliefs and resources. Culver had invested what it saved on warfare into its institutions of learning, and had made itself invaluable to all its beleaguered royal neighbors thereby. All of which had proven less than useful when the Chitauri had turned their intentions to conquest instead of their usual seasonal raids. That, and the rampaging dragon that flattened the capital city shortly thereafter had been more than the Scholar Kingdom could withstand. Culver's learned refugees were thick on the ground these days.

"Was it the Avenger that drew you here to Ironheight then?" Anthony asked, because he could hardly miss the connection, surrounded as he was with pictures of the massive reptiles.

"In part. The madness that comes upon the Great Drakes is of... interest to me, naturally. The Avenger has been known to nest within these mountains for generations, and though he has interacted but rarely with the people here, it has always been peaceable. Even when he came to Ceresia's aid in the Hydraen war, there is no hint in any record or legend that he ever turned feral. But it cannot be denied that in the battle of Hattan Plain he did so, and would surely have destroyed the Queen and her-"

"In part, you said," Anthony cut in, voice all cheer and charm and not shaking in the least. "What else has brought you wandering to Ironheight? For without roots you may be, Doctor Banner, but of the Rootless you clearly are not. Though if you stay too long and show too much competence, doubt not that they will have you adopted as soon as the Elders finish fighting over which of their clans best deserves you."

The doctor's startled expression folded briefly into a smile -- he was not fooled by the deflection, but he was, thankfully, kind enough to allow it unchallenged. He reached into the fire with the kettle hook and freshened the brew in his teapot. The steam was a calming perfume in the air as he said, "It had occurred to me that paladinstone might have certain curative uses against some of the more virulent maladies known to medical science. Especially in its activated, White Sun phase."

And there was such a mix of trepidation, guarded enthusiasm, and bashful hope in the doctor's voice, that there was nothing else Tony could do but grin, throw wide his arms, and declare at full drunken volume, that as Lady Science herself had clearly given birth to them both, the man must henceforth and forever call him brother.

~*~

~* Before: Command deck of the _Scutum_ , aloft of Hattan Plain. *~

~*~

"You must bring the _Peacemaker_ down!" Fury shouted over the wind as Anthony landed himself and the Paladin upon _Scutum_ 's command deck. He was armed for battle in gleaming black and silver, no longer remotely pretending to be any sort of monkish abbot. "That main gun fires no earthly shot, but darkness itself, and I have not yet seen anything survive it. We cannot get into cannon range without exposing our belly to that."

Anthony surveyed the armed knights manning the decks below, each of them plainly glad to be quit of their pretense at humble faith. For himself, Anthony was fiercely glad to know that Brother Steven had remained behind in Ironheight when Fury called for the launch of the Order's hidden fleet of ships. Dangerous work, fighting fires and digging for the wounded in the streets, but Anthony far preferred knowing the tiny, brave man was there and relatively safe, rather than facing the battle to come.

"Sir, the Queen," the Paladin's voice cut, tense and wary into Anthony's reverie. "The Prince must take her from this ship at once. She must be somewhere safe in case the traitor should bring the _Scutum_ down, and-"

"Then the Queen will be in the company of the most resourceful, determined, and creative guard to be had," Virginia cut in fiercely, one hand clenched to the railing, the other curled protectively over her pregnant belly as her red hair fought free of her hood and lashed about her face in the wind. "You fight for my kingdom now, Paladin, as much as for my King, and I say the Queen of Ceresia will not be dug from a hole like a rabbit if the fight should not go well."

And on the subject of people whom Tony would much prefer to have far away from the battle to come...

"Not that I like the idea of running from this fight, Pepper," Anthony tried, stepping to his friend's side, "but in your condition, I must insist that you-" The glare she turned upon him then ought, by all rights, to have lit Anthony's beard on fire. Before she could give free rein to her tongue though, Captain Hill cried out from the far side of the deck.

" _Peacemaker_ is descending again! She's making for the Chitauri delegation on the road," Hill declared, spyglass glinting as she peered downward. "Sir, the King is a hostage in that company-"

"And Stane's bastard would like nothing more than to destroy invader and monarch alike now he thinks me dead," Anthony strode to her side and plucked the glass from the woman's long fingers. Sure enough, the airship below was skimming down to strafing altitude, her strange thin-barreled cannon tilted low and fierce toward the ground, like a broken bowsprit. The breech of the weapon gaped around a pulsing blackness – not a thing painted black, nor even the absence of colour and light, but rather the destruction of them within itself. Even distorted through the viewing lens that force throbbed with palpable weight, mass, and hunger.

"When you say that it fires darkness," he began, only to yelp as Hill snatched back her glass and used it to knock a ringing blow to Anthony's helm. "Hey! Optics!" he cried, outraged, but then the Paladin's commanding voice cut the squabble dead.

"Come above, Fury," he said, striding to the rail where Hill was glaring at Anthony over her dented glass. "Then drop back five lengths, ready all guns, and hold pace. I will give you your opening." Then he half turned, slipped his arm from his shield, and handed it, White Sun blazing, to Anthony.

"You cannot mean to-" Anthony began, taking the thing onto his own arm only out of reflex. But the next second, the great noble fool proved that he absolutely _did_ mean to dive headlong over the rail and sling himself, without benefit of a single lift crystal to slow his fall, straight as an arrow toward the ship below. 

"Oh, Mother of bloody Stars!" Anthony cursed, snatching the Starkiller out of its sheath and flinging himself after the idiot at full speed.

He heard, or thought he heard, Pepper scream his name as he fell, but the roar of the wind and the scream of the blade as it drew force and fire from the speed of their fall drowned all. He could feel the lift crystals shuddering at his feet, but he knew with a sick twist beneath his belly that he would not reach the Paladin before the man crashed headfirst into the main deck of the Chancellor's ship. The airmen there did not yet see the threat, but the Paladin was closing fast, and they could not miss him for long. Anthony was not at all certain what kind of damage the fool thought he could do to the ship with nothing more than his rock-hard, armored _head_ , at any speed.

The man was throwing his life away, and to no bloody avail. The second they saw him, the gunners in the prow would swing that cannon aloft, and... no. No, Anthony had to do something -- _something_ to stop it. He could throw the shield. Then at least the Paladin could use it to... no he couldn't, for he would not see behind, and would not know to catch it as it went by, and then Stane's men would... no. No good. He could throw the sword, and let the Starkiller... no, ridiculous idea. He could trust that blade no farther than the end of his arm, and half the time not even then. He could... he could focus a blast of... no, damn it, too close! He could... he could...

Then, between one frantic breath and the next, everything changed. The Paladin shivered midair, and the rigid line of his body crumpled, twisted, and then abruptly unspooled in every direction -- as though a tightly wadded ball of clothes had suddenly caught the wind and blossomed with a snap into a vast spread of thrashing wings, gleaming claws, bristling spines and a trailing, serpentine tail. The Avenger roared as the air shivered around him, drawing every panicked eye on the ship below, then he caught the wind in his midnight vanes, stroked hard just the once, and folded his wings in tight to strike.

He was big enough – twice or more the mass of the _Peacemaker_ , that he might have simply smashed into the crowd of airmen scrambling to muster their firearms on main deck. Instead the Avenger gave a wriggle at the last moment, and a snap of wing that brushed him nimbly over the bristle of steel and shot, and down along the port side at a blinding speed. The catch of his claws in the side wales were a shriek of shattering wood, and a jolt mighty enough to pitch the doomed ship side-over into a tumbling, deadly spin. 

From two lengths away, Anthony could hear the ship's lift crystals screaming, splitting against the sudden shift in direction they could not hope to counter. Men fell howling from the decks and rigging, slung into the air like water from a dog's back as the Avenger clung and flapped. There was nothing Anthony could do for them, he realized as the _Scutum_ 's guns blasted the _Peacemaker_ from aloft as the ship rolled. Even if he wished to save them, there was no time, for as the deadly silver cannon, its black charge unflickering, slipped from its mounting even as he watched, and spun firing into the air. And suddenly, horribly, Anthony could _see_ what Fury had meant by 'no earthly shot but darkness itself'.

Three men burned away in that darkness, so suddenly, so completely that their screams outlived the throats that made them. The nothingness swept like a sword through the _Peacemaker_ 's side, gutting her lengthwise. Her shrieking engines, crystals blazing into shards, tumbled toward the ground, the last to fall free was just beginning to tint from white to red. 

Anthony could feel the White Sun in his own breast throbbing, burning in sympathy as the darkness swept the earth and sky, as though each thing it claimed became force within his Sun, doubled and doubled and doubled again beneath his skin, until he thought he might burst from it. Only the cool weight of the Starkiller humming greedily in his hand kept him centered. Then the tumbling cannon crashed to earth, bounced end over end, and spat once more as it rolled. The blast of black shot glanced across the Avenger's back, and the dragon jolted, screaming from the pain. And then the darkness bent away, rolling through the air toward Anthony – and the _Scutum_ above him. 

And the Queen he had left on her decks.

With a curse, Anthony dove into the way, shield pushed to the fore, Starkiller all but forgotten as he met the wave of darkness headlong and prayed the Paladin's White Sun would hold against the Black. And for a moment, it actually did. Where every other kind of matter had crumbled before the sweeping nothingness, the Paladin's shield somehow held true.

But the force still drove Anthony back aloft – not tumbling, thankfully, but as though he were holding back a warhorse on greasy ground. The Suns in shield and breast were an agony between them, dissonance feeding into dissonance, a struggling scarlet against the whelming darkness that reached like seeking claws around the shield's edge. He could barely breathe for it, but he dared not even imagine slacking, cracking, failing.

Anthony heard the Avenger bellow again, heard the thrash of wings seeking sky, heard claws in breaking wood, and the grinding scream of engines dying. He brought his sword hand up to steady the shield until it, or his struggling heart gave out, praying the Paladin, surely aware within the Avenger's mighty skull, of the peril to his Order and the Queen they guarded, would get aloft in time and somehow save her. 

Praying also, just a bit, that she would not see it when the shield gave way and let the blackness in. He roared through his teeth, turned his wrist to the curve of steel, and... and the Starkiller gave a hum and a chime against Anthony's grip. A wriggle, almost, and a tiny, pleased jolt. Then suddenly the barrage of darkness unraveled like smoke into strong wind. It hissed as it went, briefly, helplessly. And when it was gone, the baleful, shining sword was, without question, bigger than it had been before.

And on the ground, struggling free of the _Peacemaker_ 's remains, was the Avenger; bleeding the white light of a mighty hidden Sun from wounds along his sides and belly, his midnight scales flushing balefully scarlet at their roots. His eyes, wide and dark and filled with nothing human, fixed upon Anthony's face as he bared his gleaming teeth and roared, entirely mad.

~*~

~* After: Ironheight, Wash-fountain Courtyard *~

~*~

"Aye," the woman said, wringing soapy water from the shirt in her hands. "I mind him now. Little man; skinny, yellow hair, pretty eyes, far too big for his skin?"

"Yes," Anthony said, trying to resist the hope that simply would not stop surging up in his breast whenever people said the like. "That'll be him. Always laughing, good with children and animals." The woman was still nodding along, beginning to smile herself as she dipped the shirt into the fountain to rinse it again, and damn Anthony's foolishness anyway, he had to press on. "Brother Steven was in the city that night, and I-"

She cast him a surprised glance. "No, sir, I'm sure you're wrong. Not on That Night. I heard tell all the Brothers were tucked up inside the monastery when the Black Sun lit up. If any of the blue-robes survived the rockfall that brought the place down, they've surely not been seen in Ironheight since."

Anthony bit his lip against the urge to growl that Steven _was_ in the city that night, because Anthony had _left_ him there, and he was never one to hide away when help was wanting, and so surely _someone_ left alive in the damned city _must_ remember seeing the reckless fool at his meddling if only they would make the effort to bloody well _think_ on it. It hadn't helped his cause any of the other times he'd said that, and this time probably would not be any different.

He tipped his head back to the sky as a breeze carried spray from the playing fountain across his heated neck like the touch of a cool hand. "Mistress, there were some monks then who were stationed within the city proper," he said, flexing his hands at his sides and trying not to remember the determined thrust of knobby shoulders against his palms. "A few at Erskine Abbey and the herbarium, some at the charity larder, and always a handful at the Shrine of the Mother of Stars." She nodded again, wary of his tone, but Anthony could only sweeten it so far. " _Those_ monks were within the walls when the fires happened that night. Steven was among them, this I know for fact." 

She shrugged and turned away. "Well if he was, then he was. There's a good many who were in the city that night and nevermore left it again on their own two feet, after all. We're all sorry for the loss of them." Her voice was hard, angry as the strong hands throttling water from the linen, and the line of her shoulder was a plain invitation to ask her no more.

Anthony did not bother to thank her as he strode away from the fountain -- she did not seem to want any gratitude of his, and he certainly did not wish to tender any. The others tending to their washing watched him go, murmuring amongst themselves, but none of them stepped up to slow his retreat. They never did, whether he asked the question on the grazing green, the Lowtown markets, the high gardens, the outlying orchards, or the salvage works along the ruins of the University Quarter. No one ever stopped Anthony to tell him they'd seen Brother Steven alive, or knew where he'd gone to ground in the wake of the disaster. They merely looked at him with pity in their eyes as he stormed away and tried to think of someone else, anyone else, he could ask.

And so it took him a moment to realize that the man beside the handcart had been speaking to him. And then he had to whirl on his heel and go back to ask, "What was that?"

"I said no call makin' it personal," The man said around his pipestem, his dark hair stiff with sweat as he leaned on the tines of his pitchfork. "She lost her girls that night. Near everyone lost someone back then, and most don't like reminding of their lost ones while you're asking after yours."

"I'm not," Anthony gritted, and then had to sigh. "He's not. Lost, that is. Steven's just... I just don't know where he is."

The man shrugged, and a smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. "Misplaced then, if you like it better."

Anthony did not like it better, but there was something in the man's settled stance, in the burly arms folded at perfect ease across his tools, and the unwavering balance of him that made the prince less than willing to provoke him. He considered for a moment, remembering Peter's gossip on the road, and then extended his hand. "They call you Old Logan, don't they?"

The man did not look any older than Anthony himself, but he accepted the name with a truer smile. "They do. And they call you Red Paladin. Unless they call you Your Highness."

"Anthony will do," he tried not to bristle. 

"And they call your little monk Steven," Logan cut him off, puffing smoke into the air. "Folks all thought he was consort to you, you know?"

"You." Anthony gaped, blood heating his face. "He was -- you thought _what?_ " 

"Thought the two of you were joined at the..." his smirk hooked up hard, "...hip, or wished it so. Always together, you and him, though you bickered like old aunties all the while. And for all your tomcat prowl, anyone could see that you looked to your little monk with some intent."

All of which was achingly true, and proved nothing whatsoever. "Steven is a man of God," he mustered up the old argument he'd grown used to whalloping himself with when the temptation to tease was in danger of tipping over into far too much more. "He would never consider polluting his oath with-"

Logan's rude snort cut the weak protest dead. "Considered it just as often as you did, from what I recall seeing of the matter, and most like, he talked himself out of it thinking your highness was above the likes of him." He grinned at whatever he saw in Anthony's face then, and puffed a smoky laugh. "Why is it you Rooted folk always forget that monks are made out of men?"

"Better men than most," Anthony sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck and wondering if the thin mountain sunlight was strong enough that he should worry about a burn.

"That man, at least," Logan nodded. "And I do remember him. Here, in the city that night, just like you keep saying." 

Anthony picked up his head, stared across the fountain square to watch the sun paint the spray in drifting rainbows for a long, breathless moment. "You saw him."

"I did," he answered, suddenly sober again. "Crossed his path up University Quarter, himself makin' for the Archive, while I was hunting for the Chancellor's men. The ground was still shaking time to time, fire was just starting to spread from the Palace."

"And he was alive." It wasn't a question. Anthony couldn't make it a question.

"Alive and unhurt, shouting orders to get up a bucket brigade, last I saw of him," Logan answered all the same. "But I en't seen him again since."

"He isn't dead." Again, not a question. "He isn't."

"Like I said; I en't seen him since," came the implacable answer, along with a broad, square hand that gave his elbow a bracing shake. "Not even when we cleared the dead out of the rubble and buried them down the old sheerside quarry."

Anthony opened his eyes again, stared hard at the dancing color in the sky as he fought to swallow. "He's not-"

"He's not." Another shake drew Anthony's gaze to meet Logan's, and the stern, wary promise lurking there. "I'd have known Steven if we'd found him. We didn't." 

He looked up the mountain then, because he could not help it -- looked up the steep climb, past the new, bright scars of fallen rock and shattered timber where overcharged lodes of paladinstone had exploded and brought the old face crumbling down; looked past the menacing glitter of exposed white that one could take for ice or quartz in the sunlight, if one were determined to ignore the faint glow; looked past the empty space where the Royal Palace had thrust up, vain and tall against the mountain's spine. There had been only one tower of the Palace tall enough to peer over the sheltering ridge and spot the lonely spire of rock that marked the monastery's hidden entrance. Nowhere else in the city had the aspect or the vantage, but even knowing that, even knowing what he could not see, Anthony could not stop himself from looking.

"You'll want to take care word doesn't get out if you do," Logan said, releasing Anthony's arm to tap the ash from his spent pipe. "Folk won't like it." He gave a shrug in answer to Anthony's glower, and slipped his pipe into a pocket. "The Brothers lie where their God set them down to rest, and all their goods and gear lie along with them. Folk don't think it's fair or fitting to meddle with that after all they did to help the Rootless here. Respect is all we've left to give them now."

"Respect," Anthony managed after a moment, "is all I wish to pay."

Logan shrugged, picked up his pitchfork, and tossed it into the cart. "Then pay it quiet if you must do. You're a hero to folks here, but so are they," he nodded at the mountain, and the hidden thrust of the Traitor's Throne behind the trees. "And we Rootless look after our own."

~*~

~* Before: Ironheight, Erskine Abbey guest house, basement workshop *~

~*~

"Many in these mountains have hair like mine, Anthony," Steven sighed, running an irritated hand through the locks in question. "And blue eyes as well. It hardly means a thing."

"Then why," Anthony demanded, sighting the monk along the long spout of his alembic with a grin, "are you contesting the point?"

"Because the point is a ridiculous one!" Steven was trying valiantly not to smile, but the fight was not going well for him. He swept a hand over his slight frame, swimming as always in too much blue wool. "Look at me! I am nothing at all like the Paladin."

"Oh no, nothing at all," Anthony agreed with a roll of his eyes. 

Steven glared. "I am half his size."

"A third, more like."

"And he's older."

"Oh, nigh on a hundred years older."

"And I cannot fight wet laundry, let alone hill brigands and invading armies."

"No, certainly. Not a fighter at all," Anthony grinned, thinking of certain thoroughly cowed bullies that never seemed to appear when Steven took his turn in the Ironheight schoolroom."

"I take ill with fevers every winter, whereas he-"

"Seems perfectly comfortable making a bedchamber of a glacier while three generations pass?" He was laughing outright by then, unable to help himself. "No, surely there's no reason to wonder about _that_ sort of thing. Happens every day, doesn't it?"

"Ah, Lord save me from the madness of alchemists!" Steven shouted, throwing his hands up in frustrated surrender. "The fumes must have poisoned your brain if you can honestly imagine me inside all that armor! I'd slip right out between cuirass and cuisses!"

An excellent point, rendered rather fragile by the monk's inability to make it without chuckling himself. Anthony wiped at his eyes and poured himself more wine, drizzling a little from the alembic into the cup before setting the pitcher aside. 

"Be calm, Brother, be calm. I did not mean to say that I mistook you for the Paladin himself, merely that you remind me of him." As expected, Steven rolled his eyes, but a faint flush suggested he was pleased by the compliment. "You've a similar set of the jaw, you and he. Especially when you're frustrated."

"Oh, always, then?"

"Frequently," Anthony allowed the jab, and pushed a second cup of wine his way. "I could readily believe him your grandfather, given that his days seemed to freeze along with him in the Icefall."

Steven, sympathetic as always, gave a shudder. Then he took the cup and drained it in a long gulp. "The Paladin was a monk in his day, of this very order. He fathered no children."

"An uncle then," Anthony waved the niggle away. "Cousin somewhat removed, at very least. And you must soon cease to fight me on this, Steven, or else I will be utterly convinced that you know the relationship precisely, and are simply refusing to tell me." He reached to adjust the flame of his spirit lamp, and correct the angle of the distiller's drip plate, but watched the monk's face reflected in the curve of the glass.

He had been quietly convinced since the day Steven first brought him to the monastery, that there was more to the man than he'd allow. Steven claimed, and all his brother monks allowed it true, that he'd been born at the monastery, his mother a widow gone to the brotherhood for shelter in her time of need, and that the Brothers there had raised him there in the hills before taking him into their fold. The story was plausible enough when viewed in suspension, but let one but watch Steven awhile among his doting brothers, or mark how highly the Rootless regarded him, or how even the fugitive knights, stern and sober to a blade, respected the fiercely gentle man who would surely not be able to stand should they put him in armor, and the equation could not help but collapse under the weight of its holes. Ironheight treated its humble Brother Steven with all the reverence of royalty, and a blood connection to the Paladin, however tenuous, would go some way toward explaining it.

"You see sprites in the moonlight, your Highness," Steven said, the twist of his smile fond and unguarded. "I fear your madness is growing."

"Sprites do not exist, Steven," Anthony corrected sternly, turning to take up the alembic again, and swirl the amber contents before the light. "And neither do coincidences. I will find out the strange hold you seem to have over man and beast on this mountain!" 

Steven's laugh was a beautiful thing. "That's called 'courtesy' and 'manners'," Steven answered, reaching past Anthony's shoulder for the wine pitcher. "Forgotten arts in Ceresia these days, it would seem, but still taught in some remote regions of the kingdom."

Anthony gaped, then pointed an accusing finger. "Witchcraft! I knew it! Come and explain these black arts to me at once!" 

Which was, clearly, the ideal time for the boiling distillation to turn violently green, froth madly, and then explode, filling the laboratory with billowing black smoke and the lingering scent of jasmine flowers.

The brandy was utterly undrinkable.

~*~

~* After: Ironheight, Erskine Abbey guest house, kitchen *~

~*~

"Would you do a favor for me?" Anthony asked without preamble.

"Of course, if it is within my power," the doctor replied, not looking up from his work.

Anthony frowned, watched the sharp little knife flash against the cutting board a few times, then shook his head and laughed. "You answer too quickly, Bruce, and give me too much rein. You must know I will exploit you terribly for it."

That won a pause in the chopping, and a dubious but amused glance. Then the doctor shrugged. "Well, I expect I shall survive it all the same. Still, if mistrust would be a comfort to you, then by all means tell me exactly what it is you want me to do." He tipped a nod toward a tall three legged stool beside the fire and got on with his garlic bulbs.

"I shall first make my offer," Anthony decided, sitting and taking up the long wooden spoon to poke at the soup kettle hanging from the hob. "I will give you this house, the abbey, the gardens, the herbarium, and all that's in it," he held up a hand to forestall the obvious question. "It shall all be done legally, and soundly. Ink and wax and paper deed to stand firm in any court behind the Ironheight tradition of hearthstead claim that you have at present."

"That _we_ have at present," Bruce corrected.

"I will keep back for myself only the contents of the basement laboratory, and rights of occasional use for the library in the future. Perhaps. Depending on how things..." he waved the spoon vaguely, "go."

There at last bloomed the doubt Anthony had expected to see. "What manner of favor would you have me do?" the doctor asked. 

"A personal one," Anthony said, gaze level, habitual smirk well beyond the range of common innuendo. "I..." He turned the spoon in his hands, dripping broth on the stones. "I need you to go with me up the mountain, chain me to a bloody great rock, then go away and leave me there." 

Bruce laughed once, incredulous, but Anthony did not, and so the laughter was very brief. The silence that followed it was pregnant and very long indeed, but Anthony made himself face up to it with all the calm he could pretend. "And your servants cannot do this for you?" he asked.

Anthony spread his hands, the long spoon threaded between his knuckles. "I brought no servants with me to Ironheight, as you have seen."

"Your friends then? The Baron? Young Peter?"

"They are my friends, Bruce, they would stop me. I do not wish to be stopped."

The doctor set his knife aside, pinched the pince-nez from his nose and leveled an angry frown Anthony's way. "If it’s suicide you want, you'll find a dozen compounds in the laboratory alone that will do the job quick enough and not render me complicit in your murder!"

"You see?" Anthony grinned, tension cracking out into his grin at last. "I did warn you I would exploit your leniency." The doctor's brow lowered, and he actually made a growling noise in his throat, but subsided when Anthony set aside the spoon and raised both hands in surrender. "But you take my meaning wrong. This is no suicide. I do not wish for death, nor do I expect it up on the mountain. It's just..." he tilted his head, wondering suddenly. "Tell me, did you know, back in Culver, about the Traitor's Throne?"

Bruce nodded once, but his glower did not break. "It was known for a means of execution, was it not?"

Anthony grimaced. "Nothing so clean, I'm afraid, nor quite so simple as that." He scratched his neck, considering. "The Knights Contexterint have always been here in Ironheight, you know. Even long before the Hierophant declared them heretic and commanded the purging of the order, the Knights held the Tryskelion fortress above this city. I always thought it stupid that anyone would have blamed the Knights for the Icefall, given that the heart of their order died right there in it when the _Red Death_ 's immolation blasted the ice down from Coronus's peak."

"Their order was rich," Bruce replied, calmer now, but still not happy. "And a nation of fervent, tithe-paying believers had just been burnt from the earth. No matter if it was their own prince who'd done it to them, the world and the church wanted someone to punish." His mouth quirked, quick and wry, and he added, "Someone whose wealth and property made them worth the trouble." 

"Still," Anthony tsked, "Thin."

"Always," Bruce agreed, and bent to add his garlic to the pot. "And your being chained to a rock...?"

"Coming to that point, yes," Anthony grimaced. "The Traitor's Throne, then, was a kind of trial by ordeal that the fugitive knights were put to whenever they were caught, assuming they did not confess, repent, renounce all connections, and name a handful of others to replace them on the stone." His stomach twisted at the raw smell of the cooking soup, and Anthony pushed away from the hearth in search of the small beer. "The trial was based loosely on the vigil traditions of the knights themselves, I learned later, from... from a friend I met when I came to Ironheight. But instead of three days' fast in midsummer, it became nine days' exposure, chained fast to the rock whenever the trial had concluded, be that June or January. And instead of a constant stream of elder knights to instruct and pray with the supplicant, it became armed bowmen keeping watch to be sure neither rescue nor escape should shorten the fugitive's ordeal." 

"Radiant Light," Bruce murmured, accepting the mug of beer Anthony pulled for him. "Did many survive this?"

Anthony shrugged. "I'm a Stark, doctor. My grandfather -- my _father_ gave orders for some of those 'vigils'. I should be one of the last told of it if any of the fugitives had escaped. But given that the supposedly shattered Order of the Knights Contexterint were directly responsible for quelling the Chancellor's rebellion, and repelling the Chitauri invasion last year, I'd say the empirical evidence suggests that the ordeal was far more survivable than originally intended, yes."

"And you mean to put yourself through this ordeal." Bruce did not bother to make a question it it, which Anthony appreciated.

"Not as such," he admitted, finishing his beer and reaching to pour more. "The vigil, yes, and the supplication upon the rock. But not the rest." He shivered, remembering snow and blood, biting iron and crystals throbbing slower and slower against his struggling heart. "Three days only, as the Knights used to do it," he declared again, emphatic.

"Tell me why."

"It’s…" Anthony blinked at the demand, the hard look that was in his gentle friend's eyes. There would be no evasion here. "I have redress to make," he tried. "Penance, if you will. I owe someone…" he sighed and rubbed stinging woodsmoke from his eyes. "I owe him so much more than an apology. I owe blood debt, a kin debt. I owe him my life, whether he wants it or not."

Bruce blinked, softened. "And if he takes it from you instead of forgiving you?"

Anthony had to grin at that. "Then I forfeit the contents of my laboratory to you, Doctor, and I shall expect you to take due care with my notebooks and research." The frown returned, just as savage as before, but Anthony laughed at it now, and clapped a hand to Bruce's shoulder. "Come now; you were willing enough to glean a living in the fields of the dead when you came to Ironheight, Doctor Banner, for what is this town and all within it, but a pile of dead men’s property, free for the taking?" He rattled the doctor's shoulder, but wasn't surprised that no smile shook free. "Don’t turn missish now just because you must bargain with a living man for what he might leave behind."

"I know it may seem a strange notion for a prince, but not everyone is motivated by acquisition," Bruce growled as he ducked away. "I prefer people alive to dead under most circumstances.

"Even annoying people?" Anthony asked.

That won a chuckle, at least. "Strangely, yes," he sighed in clear surrender. "You cannot think I want your laboratory. Or your library, or your house or furniture, or any of it."

"You cannot think I wish to die upon the mountain," Anthony countered cheerily. "Come, do I seem overcome with melancholy to you?"

"You seem...rather mad to me," he answered at last, but there was a wry twist of smile beneath it that softened the blow.

"I have heard it said," Anthony admitted, and finished his beer.

"And what will your subjects have to say on the disappearance of their mad prince?" Bruce asked. "Or is it 'the mad brother-in-law to their mercifully sane new Queen?'"

"It's neither, come tomorrow night. Mad or not, I am far too selfish to rule," Anthony grinned.

Bruce rolled his eyes. "So speaks the man who nearly died to save his brother’s Queen from a rampaging dragon. You’ll pardon me if I find the evidence of your selfishness less than convincing."

"More data makes all the difference," Anthony shrugged. "Now Doctor Banner, enough evasion. Will you do as I’ve asked?"

The doctor searched his face, hazel eyes keen and searching, as though to diagnose his shame and prescribe some simpler physic for it than this. "It is not a thing I care for," he said at last.

"Very well then," Anthony groaned and thumped his mug down. "I'll find someone down Gateside who’ll be desperate enough to do it for gold in hand. I would go alone, save that I cannot fasten the chains without help." He swept to his feet, brusque enough to cover his disappointment, if not his frustration at being so kindly thwarted. He'd known it would be hard, finding someone to help, but he'd hoped this doctor, with his gentle hands and sorrowful eyes, might better understand.

"You might just as well keep the house and books if I don’t come back though," he said as he turned for the door. "I like the idea of you having the lot better than what else might befall-"

Bruce caught his arm in a grip far stronger than it looked, and growled, "Sit down, you fool. I said I do not care for it, not that I wouldn’t do it."

Something tight and tangled uncoiled in Anthony's breast, and he blinked. "You will? You’re sure?

"I …" The doctor drew a long breath, and then set his spectacles aright again. "I understand somewhat about making amends. And I prefer that you arrive intact at your destination rather than being throat-slit for your gold and tumbled into some roadside ditch."

"Ah, see?" Anthony laughed. "I knew you for a hero from the first, Doctor."

But Bruce only glared. "Bollocks. I'd be the last to see you living, and the man most enriched by your death is what, and I've no notion of being punished for the consequences of _your_ royal foolishness. Now sit down while I finish with the soup, damn you."

~*~

~* 1 week after: Armarille City, Prince's Chambers of the Royal Palace *~

~*~

_Steven, they will not tell me anything of you._

_I ask, I wheedle, I bluster, I reason, I cajole and Steven, I beg, and these dour faced, pitiless knights of yours merely tell me that they are busy and that no news of Ironheight has come. No word from you. No word._

_They tell me then, to a soul, that they've not time to let drop the busywork of war's abrupt end, step away from Virginia's beck and call, and the army's dogpit-posturing, and hie them off to the North to ascertain the whereabouts of one quiet little man. And then they bid me get about my own business and leave them to theirs -- as if the eternal whinging and excuse-making of Ceresia's rotting noble council was worth half a damn when I do not know where you are. And then they disappear into the council room or barracks or battlefield before I can convince them of anything._

_No news, Steven. Nothing of you, good or ill. As if not one of them cares..._

_And so I know from this that you must be alive._

_It is simple logic, though I know you will decry it as fancy -- you always do, humble fool -- they would kill me where I stand, these valiant brothers of yours, if you were not living still. I know this to the deepest seat of my soul, and if you mean to convince me otherwise, I invite you at once to do your best. I beg you to try, for that will be proof that you are alive and in the world, and I am a scientist, Steven -- I must have data. Mere theories ache and cramp in the absence of proof, and this one pains me sorely._

_I must know it. I must._

_But I cannot leave Armarille now to find out for myself. I must rely upon the observations of others, and upon my theories for now. Ergo I shall lay it out plain: You are alive. You are angry with me for locking you in my wine cellar. I had no right to do it, I know, but even knowing how I wronged you, I cannot now look back and wish I had done otherwise. You are bold and lionhearted within that kitten's body, Steven, and we know, the both of us, that you would have been aboard the Abbot's ship that day had I not stopped you, and I could not face... I cannot face the thought that then you would surely have been witness to it._

_Bad enough that someone will tell you, that you will learn the news of my crime against your house, your order, and your brotherhood from a stranger when it should be me who confesses it -- that you should have stood witness while I murdered ~~The Avenger... The Paladin~~ the dragon would have been more than I could bear. I know you have claimed no kinship with him, and you know that I have never believed you, and so I will make my amends to you, my friend, for his blood upon my sword, and for the dishonor of his memory._

_And yet I cannot leave Armarille now. Virginia needs my aid, she says, between securing and quartering the Chitauri prisoners, arranging my brother's funeral, amending the damage to Armarille city and the harbor there, wringing what treachery out of the Council as may be possible, and just enough sabre-rattling to make Latveria, Kreeland and Skrullder think better of opportunistic invasion; I should be surprised if I am allowed to escape the South for a sixmonth yet. Virginia is reading over my shoulder, and she's laughed at me just now, and said a sixmonth is optimism rarified, and that a year might just be possible. I have told her I expect on her queenly honor that she will hold to that promise, and she has laughed again. She is a merry Queen, Steven, and a great friend, ~~and I pray you will allow me to...~~_

_No apology of mine can ever be enough for what I have cost you -- what I have cost Ceresia itself, but I will make my apology all the same. I beg you, Steven, only to allow me to hear from your own lips, or at least in your own hand, if I may be forgiven or no, for the only other being of whom I would ask absolution is dead at my hand, and not even God may forgive me that. I do not ask for forgiveness, though I may hope for it in some optimistic moments. All I ask for, my friend, is the chance to tell you how sorry I am. Sorry that I shamed you as a man, and sorry that I robbed you of your celebrated kinsman._

_I will wait until next summer. Ceresia demands no less of me than that. But if I have not spoken to you, or at least heard from you by then, I shall return to Ironheight and search for you myself. And if I find you nowhere else, then on Midsummer's eve, I will ascend to the Traitor's Throne and make my atonement to you there in the only way I can imagine mattering if your good will for me be entirely broken. Or if -- as I have never once allowed myself to believe -- you are lost to me in death._

_Only one thing will dissuade me from this course, my little monk. Only one voice may stay me. I pray but to hear it again, if only to curse my name and call me royal jackass once more._

_I remain in all things, Brother Steven, yours, always._  
_Always._  
_Prince Anthony Edward Stark_

~*~

~* After: Mount Coronus, the Supplicant's Seat, first night. *~

~*~

"The purpose of a vigil," said a wryly amused voice behind him, "is meant to be reflection and meditation upon one's life, not reading a treatise upon the distillation of mercuric compounds."

Anthony managed not to flinch, but it was a near thing. He had expected more time alone before the first of them came. "This _is_ my means of meditation," he answered, marking his place with a long blade of grass before closing the book and looking up. "The distillations of mercury are well known to be allegorical representations of Good Mother of Stars, is that Lady Talia I see before me?" 

She laughed, shaking her head as Anthony climbed to his feet, the great shackle on his waist clanking against his armor as he moved. "Natasha," she corrected, sliding fully into the circle of lamplight around them. "And I am no allegorical representation of the Lady."

"You were when last I saw you in Armarille," he said, offering his hand. "You wore blue, I remember, and your hair tumbling out just so from your hood as you danced. You looked the very picture of a queen's lady in waiting."

She reached past his palm and clasped his forearm in a warrior's unyielding grip, and her green eyes full of challenge. "As _I_ remember, you tried to convince the Queen that I was an assassin when last you saw me."

"And lo, it appears I was correct, wasn't I?" He challenged, one gesture taking in her compact form from chin-cropped hair to sturdy, serviceable riding leathers the colors of mottled shadow, the glimmer of steel peeking through whenever she moved. "I did not take you for a Knight though. I ought to have realized Fury would have placed one close."

She freed her hand with a smirk and caught her cloak about her again. "You were not meant to take me for anything at all. I was not in Armarille for your benefit."

"I gathered. But why are you _not_ in Armarille now? The Queen ascends to her throne tomorrow. Surely her Knight Assassin should be at her side for it."

"Oh, surely. As should her husband's brother and heir, the Prince Abdicate, and the best of her friends, no doubt." Talia -- no, Natasha -- agreed, and her smile was a tart, pointed thing. "Yet here we both stand upon the Supplicant's Seat at midnight on Midsummer's eve, and I am not certain either of us knows exactly why." 

Anthony looked away across the chasm that separated the lonely spire of rock from the sheer cliffside. Here and there, he could see the faint tickle of paladinstone beneath the mountain's granite skin, charged to such blazing whiteness as to make the grey stone gleam in places as though in moonlight. He stroked one hand across the White Sun in his breast, feeling the pulse of its power buzzing between the armor and his skin. "I know why I am here," he said.

She made a noise behind him – impatience or amusement, or both. "Mm. Vanity, of course," she said as if in agreement. He turned to glare, but she had moved away, and was inspecting his bags with a frown. "You do know you're meant to fast during your vigil..." she said, holding up a wine jug and a loaf of bread.

"Of course I know that," Anthony huffed, clanking across the stone to take both from her. "It's for my guests, not me. And what do you mean, 'vanity'?"

"You punish yourself for events which you could not possibly have controlled," she shrugged, turning back to his pack and pulling out a horn cup. "You are like a fisherman trying to atone to his neighbors for a hurricane."

"A hurricane I ought to have anticipated," he said, and filled her cup. "A storm I might have prevented, had I but paused to _think_ before I ran after the Black Sun like a fool."

"Truly?" she asked, her brows arched high and skeptical. "And you do not call this assumption vanity?"

Her tone was mocking, but Anthony took firm hold of his pride and reminded himself that he had come expecting to be challenged. "Were you in Ironheight the night Chancellor Stane died, Lady Talia, or Natasha, or whatever I am to call a lady Knight?"

"Ma'am will do for now," she answered, and dropped to sit beside his baggage, folding her legs tailor-style beneath her, as if skirts and petticoats and farthingales had never crossed her mind. "And no, I was not. I was in the Hattan Crossing gaol, explaining to a pair of prison guards how I could possibly have been mistaken for Queen Virginia when they'd ambushed her coach on the high road." She smirked, and Anthony couldn't help returning it.

"Which of her dresses did she give you?"

"The amber brocade with marten fur and sapphires," she shrugged. "It was convincing enough from afar."

Anthony whistled, remembering the gown in question chiefly on the strength of its neckline. "I wish I'd seen that."

She smirked, and her green eyes caught the lamplight with a dangerous glint. "I've heard the Chancellor had you distracted at the time." She patted the stone beside her, and Anthony did not bother to hide his wince at the reminder of his first unwilling visit to the Traitor's Throne. "And yet here you stand, claiming credit for his works."

"Blame," Anthony corrected, lowering himself awkwardly to sit. His armor, never designed for ease, pinched awkwardly where it did not rub or swelter, but he was glad of it all the same.

"Did you give the Chancellor the means to his end?" Natalia asked him over the rim of her cup. "Did you give him the White Sun that he turned to Black?"

He rubbed a hand over his breast, briefly eclipsing the glow, and trying not to remember too much of blood, snow, and darkness. "He had it of me, yes."

She shook her head. "He _took_ it from you. That is not the same." He shrugged, and she tsked. "And his method – the alchemical process of waking a Black Sun from the White; did you teach him that, or did he perhaps come by it on his own, by accident in the workshop?"

"In _my_ workshop," Anthony said. "Well, my Grandfather's, but still I was using it then. And in it, Obidiah found _my_ research notes, and _my_ tools, and and-"

"And all that while, as I've heard the story told, you were chained here." She knocked the stone twice with her knuckles. "Left to die right on this spot, with the Hungry Star lodged in your breastbone. Do not pretend to have set the Chancellor upon his path, nor to have armed his madness."

Anthony sighed, made to rub at his eyes, but remembered his gauntlets and pulled short. "The Chancellor is not the point," he said, and her head tilted in disbelief. 

"No, he is not, damn you! It was not the Chancellor who drove the Avenger mad, it was the Black Sun, and I..." He swallowed, wishing she would put the wine jug back into the pack, but unwilling to ask. "I should have realized it would."

"I was in Ironheight that night," he went on after several minutes of silence invited him to explain. "I recovered my strength at the monastery for a day or two, but ... there were things at Erskine Abbey guest house that I could not risk Stane finding. I had to go back, no matter what the Abbott – what Sir Fury preferred."

"Your armor." She did not make a question of it. 

"That too." This time he let the silence hang longer between them. Not resisting the ordeal of explaining himself to her, but simply remembering, and waiting for the words he had been searching for all year to find him.

"At first there was just the sound; like wind through a steep canyon, or a wet finger rubbing at crystal. Low and faint at first, but it grew quickly. Soon dogs and horses began to scream, and everywhere, it seemed, there was as aimless sort of light -- blue and cold and throbbing. Paladinstone, of course." Anthony nodded across the chasm toward the veiled lodes that shone through the granite like white flame behind a thick grey curtain. "Half of Ironheight's built out of the stuff, especially the wealthier quarters. Mostly though, it's made of the poorer grade of it spent, cold, and dormant for ages, assuming it ever held charge at all. But that night it was glowing, pulsing as it drank up the aura that was rolling through the city." 

"I had seen it before, that glow," he tapped at his breastplate, the crystals beneath it shining colder and brighter than his lamp. "The city's stones, base clouded, spent and so flawed that no sane alchemist would dare tamper with them – the stones were rarified. They were lighting with the White Sun all around us, and it was..." he closed his eyes, the memory blooming across the darkness at once. "Beautiful." 

He reached for the wine jug. "And then they began to explode."

She said nothing as he uncorked it and refilled her cup, but took the jug from his fingers when he had, and left it well behind the pack. "I have heard of this, somewhat," she said, taking a sip. "But I still do not see why you should feel that-"

"My own White Sun was affected too," he said. "It burned worse, I think, than it had when first the crystals lodged in me. I thought they would kill me; it felt like they were turning my flesh to vitriol and melting me where I stood. Ste..." the name cracked in his throat. Anthony swallowed hard, and forced it through. "Brother Steven saved me. He thought to put the Starkiller into my hand just as my White Sun was tinting to Red. The Hungry Star, did you call it?" She nodded, her fair brows knit low with concern. Anthony mimed a smile at her. "Well it was just hungry enough to right my humors so that I could fly from the city in time. I could see from above though, as the Royal Palace collapsed upon itself, that those stones too were glowing red rather than white. It too had shattered under the force of the changing Sun," he said, tipping back his face to the stars.

"So that's what happened then..." came her quiet murmur after a long moment.

He nodded. "The Palace, the University, Hightown, the Citadel's hidden armory, even the unmined lodes within the mountain failed to bear up under the Black Sun's charge. And hardly a soul who survived that disaster in Ironheight knows what a blessing it was that they did fail too." She hummed agreement, perhaps picturing as he was, what greater havoc a Red Sun might have wrought out of that night. 

"When the Paladin found me afterward," Anthony forced himself onward. "When he brought me to the Abbot's mustering fleet and we set out to chase the Chancellor's bastard down... I said nothing to him about the Red Sun shift. I did not _warn him!_ "

"And why should you have done?" she asked. "The Paladin was no alchemist. He could hardly have made use of the knowledge-" 

" _I had seen the man bleed_!" Anthony cut her off with a snarl, slashing his hand like a blade through the night. "I had seen the glow of his humors after battle, white as my own Sun until his flesh healed them over. Of all men in the world, I could never mistake that white light for anything but what it was. I should have warned him because, like me, he had the White Sun in him somehow..." he curled his hand closed. "And it was that which destroyed him"

"No," she answered after a long moment, "it was not."

He huffed a laugh. "Of course not. _I_ destroyed him."

He was unprepared for her quick, bright laughter. "And I say again, Stark;" she said, jostling his shoulder with her own. "Vanity. You are the very definition of the sin."

"Well then so it is." He was pouting, he knew it, and was not overly moved to curb it. "I am vain. I have not ever really denied it. But I am also guilty in this, and I will make my atonement whatever you think of it."

She poked a nimble finger between the seams of his cuirass and smirked at the sound he made. "With your alchemist's armor and your star-killing sword, it looks more as if you have come to make war than atonement," she said over the loose jangling of chains as he scooted out of reach.

"Only if you knights insist on challenging me to duel during the vigil," he told her warily, hoping she would let him get to his feet first if she intended to draw steel. "Steven told me that much of the ritual."

She merely took another sip of her wine, and cut a pointed glance at his brow. "And have you come to the Supplicant's Seat as a conquering prince tonight?"

He scoffed. "You know very well who rules in Ceresia as of tonight Natasha, and it is _not_ Anthony Stark."

"Then I'll make this advice my first lesson to you," She said, setting the horn cup aside and pushing to her feet in a single fluid movement. "You will fare better on this vigil if you remove that coronet and seek your knighthood as a humble man rather than a spoiled, vain princeling."

She offered her hand to help him rise, and Anthony decided he was not too proud to accept it. "I have never been a humble man," he confessed with a little groan for his stiff knees. "I'm not sure it's within my range. But I will surrender this coronet to one man only." He gripped her hand for just a second longer than decorum allowed. "Tell Brother Steven to come here himself and ask it of me, and he alone shall have it without contest."

She held his eye for a second longer than decorum allowed, then shrugged and gave a tart little smile, saying, "So be it," as she turned to go. 

"Wait," Anthony called after her. "Who will come next? Are you allowed to tell me?"

"Barton," she called back from the narrow steps. "And he's here already." 

Following the aim of her pointing finger across the chasm, Anthony squinted until he could pick out a rangy, yellow haired figure from the shadows on the cliffside ledge. There was a flicker of movement, a flash of glass or maybe a grin, and then a bright speck of blue stone whipped through the air and struck the seam of his gorget like a hammer blow.

Anthony yelped, cursed, and then dodged as another sliver of paladinstone, this one glowing a bit brighter, arced across the chasm. "What the devil?" he shouted, scrambling to find cover and failing.

"My first lesson to you," the archer called as Anthony tripped on his chains and nearly measured his length on the stones, "is to be watchful, always."

"Watchful," Anthony growled, skittering aside as another stone whistled past his nose.

"That, and nimble too!" came the laughing reply. "Come, Supplicant; I've many stones gathered here, and you've many hours left to fill. We'll neither of us soon be bored."

~*~

~* Before: Ironheight Royal Palace, the Prince's bedchamber *~

~*~

"There," Obidiah said, patting at Anthony's heaving belly with a grin. "Much more useful than coded notes and coy allegorical references, isn't it?" The White Sun gleamed red through a sheen of blood as the Chancellor turned it admiringly before his face. Beside the table, sweaty and fevered in the cold glow, the anatomist squinted at the gaping wound his work had left in Anthony's chest, and scribbled frantically in his notes. Anthony found himself hoping never to see whatever it was the grisly little man found so fascinating there, but one cramping breath later, realized how terribly likely it was that he never would.

"It would have been cleaner had you assisted my research willingly," the Chancellor carried on, wiping his stolen prize clean on the hem of Anthony's bedshirt before tucking it into his purse. "Still, given your temperament and your recent notions of derring do, this way of attaining the White Sun is a simpler option than convincing you to make yourself actually useful. I regret to say it, Prince Anthony, but you have become less than reliable to me lately."

Breathing was agony, coughing worse, and so Anthony focused on the Chancellor's face and tried to spit instead. He barely managed a groan, and received another condescending pat for the trouble. "Save your strength, son," Obidiah said. 

"Sir, the wound," the anatomist breathed, poking at Anthony's chest with an inky finger. "It is..."

"Not fatal," Obidaiah scoffed, sparing but a glance. "He can stand to lose several more before the shock will become too much. And the rest will come the easier for lack of his twitching. You," he nodded at the burly assistant holding Anthony's shoulders to the bed. "Go and fetch a case to put the rest in. A wooden coffer, but clean and dry – nothing from kitchen or pantry. And find silk to line it as well, just in case. There should be plenty in the young peacock's clothes press."

Anthony shivered as the pressure released, slid a restive hand into the tangle of bedclothes and gripped hard at the blade he found there – perhaps one of the doctor's tools astray, or something fallen from the thug's belt during Anthony's brief waking struggle, either would do. Wherever the little knife had come from, it was cold, it was sharp, and it curved into Anthony's hand like a breath of prayer.

"And tell the guards that his Highness' fever is still high," the Chancellor added after his retreating thug with a smirk. "It is doubtful he will last the night, but the royal doctor here will do his best." He laughed as the door closed, turned his attention back to Anthony once more. "The Queen will miss you, Anthony. When we find where she's run to, I'm certain the news of your demise will simply crush her. I shouldn't be surprised to see her die of a broken heart, in fact."

"It is closing," the doctor muttered, his eyes flicking accusingly between Anthony's face and the wound in his breast. "The wound is healing."

"What's that you say?" the Chancellor snapped, and then Anthony was moving. One swiping lunge opened the doctor's throat, but he had no time for a second. His lunge fell short, and Obidiah's great paw closing over his drove his arm back into his own chest – a shocking, icy punch that shattered his breath and clawed the darkness close around him.

 _'Two blades,'_ he realized as he slid to the ground, staring down at what protruded from his chest. The strange toy he'd found in his Grandfather's study; one blade of fine, but spent Paladinstone, the other an empty socket, tucked into a sheath of lead. He'd taken it back to his bedroom as a curiousity more than anything, but even in better light the engraving on the lead was so fine, so nicked and rubbed by the years, that he had only been able to work out half of one word on it; _Stark_. 

Blood sprayed from his lips as he laughed and laughed at the irony.

And when he came to himself again it was night, it was snowing, and six thugs in storm cloaks and thick, muffling scarves were binding him to the Traitor's Throne.

Once they'd chained him down, none of the guards came within arm's reach of Anthony again. They stood close enough for their spear butts to knock him down every time he tried feebly to rise, but far enough that they provided no relief at all from the snow-laden wind rushing down from the heights. His shirt was freezing to his skin, the hot pulse of his blood too sluggish to warm him without a doublet or cloak. He had long since lost sense of his feet and hands, trusting to the twist of linen pulling against his throat that he was still at least attempting to press his shirt tightly against the jutting knife. But not drawing it out, he remembered, in case the blade itself pressed closed some vein within. Steven would be proud of him remembered that, he thought.

The guards around him wore no livery, but their storm gear was all of a type and a color – greys touched with scarlet, like blood on frozen stone. Hoods and scarves to hide the face as much as to shield it, jerkins sewn with metal plates inside, boots bespoke and fitting well – no pretense anymore to simple brigandry. 

Only one of the Chancellor's thugs, the archer watching from his post across the chasm, broke the mold. He wore the Palace livery still, and his purple and black marked him out sharp and clear against the swirling snow and frozen sky as Anthony lay, and bled, and struggled to breathe around the blade lodged in his chest. The pulse of his Suns, grown familiar as his own heartbeat since his first escape from the bandits – no doubt the Chancellor's men then as well, he realized now – was fading, slowing. He could see so little of their light, even as the snowflakes danced through their glow. 

The weight of the knife in him seemed to grow, as though someone pressed it down upon him by torturous degrees, and the bowman was a poor guard, peering upward into the storm instead of minding the approach as he was surely stationed there to do. Anthony wondered, stupidly, if the man was bored, or perhaps too squeamish to watch a royal fool bleed to death in the snow. Steven insisted though, that snow was good against bleeding. That the winter could keep a man held on the edge of death sometimes, and allow his own strength to creep back under its cover, and find him healed, or nearly so, come the thaw.

Anthony had laughed at him then. Regret for that came upon him now, absurdly, given all that he had to regret, and Anthony found himself wishing he'd the chance to tell Steven he believed the fancy true. Or perhaps he simply _wished_ the fancy might be true, so there would be a chance, however slim, of waking once more to hear his name upon those lips...

The archer started, shielded his eye, and Anthony thought he saw a flashing grin. Then as the wind rattled, gusting and roaring in the crags above, he turned and began firing across the gap, battlefield quick and deadly sure. The guards fell like cordwood, not so much as a surprised grunt between them, and the storm flapped midnight wings to knock the toppling men away into the darkness. Anthony alone, chained in place and frozen to the stone, did not budge.

Not until the Paladin stooped to catch him up in warm, strong hands. Not until the blade, somehow twice, thrice as long as when it had stabbed him, slid free of his breast with a lurching chime, and a sick twist in his belly. Not until unconsciousness and a warm fur cloak wrapped tight about Anthony and murmured his name in a voice that sounded strangely, beautifully like Steven's.

~*~

~* After: Mount Coronus, the Supplicant's Seat, first day *~

~*~

The next one came, naturally, when Anthony least expected him.

"Do you not have a coronation to attend this morning, Stark?" The question was as harsh and unforgiving as the sunrise glaring across the plains, but after an initial jolt and curse of alarm, Anthony just heaved a sigh, finished his morning piss and shook himself clean.

"Oddly, I thought the same of you, Abbot Fury," he said, tucking his prick away and turning to face the head of the Order of the Shield, resplendent and disgruntled in enameled armor of black and gold. "You're certainly dressed for it, though I suspect you'll be late for Pepper's ceremony if you do not get underway soon."

Fury stepped up onto the leveled stone, glaring. "You take all this for sport, do you?" he growled. "A pageant of swords and secrets? Adventures and amusing puzzles to distract you from all that your kingdom needs of you?"

"It is no longer my-" Anthony began, but was not surprised when Fury cut him off.

"It is a bigger game the Order plays now, _Red Paladin_ ," he painted the title thick and heavy with scorn, "than bandits in the highlands and forgotten trinkets hidden in caves. Now the White Suns are alight by the thousands all across this kingdom, and you, of all men, cannot imagine that anything will afterward be the same. Ceresia's wealth and fame has gone from 'bread and wine in an iron basket' to 'lone native source of the White Sun', and with that changes also the tenor, avarice, and desperation of her rival kingdoms, from Shi'ar to the Hierophant's See. Yet this morning in Armarille, while the vultures circle and scheme, a _widow_ ascends to Ceresia's throne" he paused, glaring as if he wished to set Anthony alight with his single eye. "And the man who put her there has run away to the mountains to hide from the consequences of his actions."

"No," Anthony said once the echoes had wandered off to scornful mumbling. He boosted his chin and fetched out a glare of his own as dawning sun woke sparks from his coronet to freckle the stones around with light. "For the first time in my life, Sir Fury, I am running from nothing." And moving with deliberate slowness, he fetched out the sword he had brought with him. 

Fury followed the motion with his eye alone, and a tiny curl broke the angle of his glare when he realized it was not the Starkiller. Anthony had brought _that_ sword for a different purpose altogether, and he fully intended to leave it where it lay, asleep and dreaming within its leaden shroud, until that purpose should arrive.

"And you imagine that seeking the shield in trade for your crown is anything else?" Fury folded his arms across his breastplate and smirked openly. "Explain to me, please, how you reason that taking knightly orders instead of helping your brother's widow to rule your father's kingdom is _not_ running away."

And there, Anthony had to smile. Fury's taunting jabs were nothing more than feints, probing at his guard to see where he might slip or falter. _'The Supplicant is tested, over the length of his vigil, to be sure he is worthy, and that his will and determination are strong enough to stay the course,'_ Steven had told him, a year and a lifetime ago. It helped, remembering that now. 

"I think it's a deeper wisdom than you're willing to admit, old man," Anthony said, falling into _garde_ position and leveling a smirk along the length of his blade. "And I also think that if you came to fight me, you had better get out your steel and stop wasting my day. I've only got two of them left, you know."

Fury let out an answering grin then and pulled loose the knotted cord that held on his embroidered cape. Then as it fell away, he swept two short swords from behind him and dropped into a low, taut _garde_ that brought one blade to the fore, the other up from behind to hover like a scorpion's tail. "I'll try," he said, "to see to it you're not too bored."

~*~

~* Before: Mount Coronus, Triskelion Citadel mustering hall. *~

~*~

"That man," Anthony croaked sitting up and rubbing gingerly at his throat, "I knew he was never any damned monk!"

Steven laughed a little and held out a hand to help Anthony back up to his feet again. "You just startled him is all," he said, applying a surprising amount of force, given his size. "He couldn't hear us approach over the noise of the workshop – I should have announced our presence before we were right behind him."

Anthony grimaced, his attention returning to the bustle and noise going on in what must once have been the great gathering hall of the Citadel. Now it seemed to have become the better part of a mustering field, an armory, ten smithies, fifteen alchemical workshops and a shipyard. And it was crawling with people who were also decidedly _not_ monks. "That's Sister Danvers," he declared, pointing to the woman fitting and dispensing pieces of armor. "And Archivist Coulson is behind that athanor as well!" And now he was looking past the shine of new-built ship's engines and airskids, of swords and helms and shields, Anthony realized he saw familiar faces all across the bustling floor. "Mother of stars, I am a fool. Hundreds of monks mewed up together to no purpose in a distant mountain retreat. Of _course_ you Erskalines are all fugitive knights in secret!"

"Not all of us, obviously," Steven said with a gesture to his own slight frame. His tone tried for nonchalance, but missed it by a good distance, and Anthony could read plainly the mixture of annoyance and pleasure at the implication. "But I don't know why you're surprised. The Erskaline order has been attached to the Knights Contexterint since the both were founded, a cent – two centuries ago."

"How can I not be surprised, seeing all of this?" Anthony gestured to the far vault of the hall, where the hull of a great airship was taking shape against the dais where once the knights had entertained and intimidated the crowns of the world. "You've got an _ironworks_ down inside this mountain, Steven! And yet the smoke and smell never reach the city, and the adventurers who have been combing this mountain in search of the Royal Armory since the Icefall itself have never noticed?"

"Adventurers like you?" Steven prodded with a smile, then rolled on before Anthony could bluster. "Simply put, you see the product of much _recent_ effort on the part of the orders. The Erskalines and our Carterine sisters, as well as the Knights of the Shield who never took to the shelter of the cloth." He nudged Anthony's arm and nodded him toward a small hearth at the end of the long overlook gallery, where a young woman tended a coffee kettle and soup pot over the coals. He couldn't smell the steam over the coalsmoke from below, but Anthony's stomach rumbled at the idea of a hot meal all the same, so he let himself be led.

"This hall," Steven told him, "Nearly all of the Citadel, in fact, was under the ice until just a few years ago. It had been the command center of the order – the entire Ceresian army, in fact, before the icefall, and so the entrances were cleverly hidden and well guarded, and when the mountain's crown melted and re-froze, it claimed this place as well as the better half of Ironheight. It was lost to everyone until the Thaw, but Sir Fury has done a great deal with it since then."

"The Melt," Anthony said, then shrugged at Steven's look. "That's what they called it in the city. I was here for that. Happened about six months after I moved into the Abbey. Just after..." he rubbed briefly at his chest. "Everyone thought Lowtown was going to wash away down the mountain that week. I remember Baron Rhodes pulling his men from the fields and his ships to try and shore up the stonework of the bridges. I could see the crews working from my window..." It had been frustrating, terrifying, and infuriating. He'd been bedridden, weak as a kitten, and utterly useless while the city around him struggled to survive the sudden deluge. He'd also been alone. No one had been there to look in on him, listen to his complaints, or to see to any but his most basic needs, because they had all been out in the streets with their shovels, desperation, and clinging will. It had taught him a sharp lesson, that fortnight, sharper even than the blazing crystals lodged so deeply in his chest. It had changed him. It was changing him still.

"So Fury arranged all of this beneath the Chancellor's nose in just three years' time?" Anthony shook off his reflection to ask. "I can understand my brother missing a mustering of monks in the mountains, but Stane should really have noted the movements of the materiel, tools and supplies. Feeding this lot alone must require ..." he peered hard at Steven over the rim of his mug, and then pointed an accusing finger. "So _that's_ why you've been so keen on recovering Ironheight's fields and orchards! And all those trips out to the hill farmers for seed stocks and cuttings! Those were never for the herbarium at all, were they?"

Steven's laugh was a beautiful thing, delighted and proud at once. "Anthony, half those farmers have sons and daughters within our orders. They are as happy to see the Citadel's return as they are to see Ironheight flourishing once more. Why should they report their good fortune to a man who's done nothing but crush it out for years? Besides," he waved a hand at the bustling floor once more. "Most of the tools and much of the raw machinery were here already when Fury recovered the place. It was the command center during the Hydraen war, after all. Much of the Royal Armory was surprisingly intact once the ice was gone."

And at that, Anthony had to chuckle. "Somewhere, Chancellor Stane's just noticed he has a splitting headache made entirely of envy, but he's no idea just why..."

"Anthony?" Steve's hand brushed his sleeve, wary and worried, but he couldn't make himself look away from the carved archway. Not yet.

He turned, still staring, put himself directly beneath the arch, between the columns with their claw-shaped capitals, above the floor mosaic of a five-pointed mullion with two bent bars behind it. And then he looked up and saw, as he'd known he would, the dragon arching long and sinuous across the great hall. It was subtle, cunningly executed in the architecture so that it was all shadow and angle unless viewed from precisely that spot. And Anthony had seen it before.

"Anthony, are you well?"

He turned at last, caught Steven's fingers in his. "I have been here," he breathed. Then he tugged the monk back into the corridor, away from the noise going on below. "The brigands," he said, pressing Steven's chilly fingers against his doublet, and the crystals bulging beneath it. "The kidnapping, remember I told you?" 

"Yes of course. An explosion in the mine, and you escaped in the confusion-"

"I came _here_ , Steven!" He turned again to stare, but the dragon was gone from the ceiling shadows. "Dummy... I found him there, dragged myself on thinking like all horses he must surely know how to find his home, and wherever home was, it made for better odds than me wandering about, wounded and lost in the storm. I thought we'd wind up at a farm, or some Rootless encampment, but instead he brought me to a cave."

Steven blinked, a stitch of impatience between his brows. "A cave."

"With stairs at the back, and a door after that, and then corridors and rooms," Anthony insisted. "All empty, desolate; thick with dust and smelling of mouse. And everywhere I looked, there were dragons -- carved on the columns, painted on the walls, woven into rotting tapestries, set into the bloody floor, even worked in coloured glass on the windows!" He dragged Steven back to the archway, his manic energy overwhelming the monk's slight resistance, and there he pointed out the long, sweeping shape that hung in silent watch over all.

"I stood on this spot, Steven, too cold to feel the blood running from my fingers, but..." he drew a shaking breath against the weight of remembered awe and tapped nervously at his chest. "I could not look away."

"From what?" Steven's voice sounded thin in the vast space, nervy beneath the rattle and chatter of the floor.

"The ice." He raised his hand, the gesture sweeping the length of the hall and beyond. "An enormous wall of it, pure and clear as glass. I could see light through it from those windows, and the ones over there as well. The colors struck veils and swirls within the ice, so it was like gazing in a witch's mirror. And far down within it, perhaps a dozen yards, perhaps more -- I could see a shadow, about the size of a man, I can tell now, but at the time, in that great mass of ice, it seemed but a fleck... a tiny blackness wrapped around the spark of a distant star. And yet it stood out to my eye, sharp as a flaw in the heart of a diamond."

He turned to Steven, found the monk's eyes enormous, his lips damp, fallen slightly open around awe or alarm. "What..." he licked his lips, coughed the squeak from his voice, and tried again. "What did you do?"

Anthony grinned, rueful and wry. "Why I did what any man would have done," he said, and jostled Steven's cassock awry with a teasing shove. "I fainted from my wounds. The Sun was very newly upon me, remember; my vitals had not yet learnt their way around it."

The alarm did not fall away though. If anything, it deepened. "You swooned? Here? _Alone_ " Steven gaped. "Anthony, you might've _died_!"

What could he answer to that but a nod? Anthony caught Steven's narrow shoulders under a grip meant to reassure, even as his own belly churned at the truth of it. "But I did not. In fact, I proved rather competent in my unconscious state, as the next firm thing I recall was waking in the royal chambers in Ironheight's palace with my wounds bandaged up tight, and Baron Rhodes storming the gates to find just who was lighting lamps and fires in the place without his leave."

He turned back to the hall, ignoring the knights in favor of the stealthy guardian above it. "I discounted the whole as delerium. Thought I must have been merely wishing myself safe, like a child lost in the woods... until I saw that." He drew a deep breath, and blew it out slow. "I was here. I saw the ice. I saw the Avenger. I was here..."

A touch startled him from his awe, and Anthony looked down to find Steven's palm resting gently, reverently over the crystals in his breast. His touch was light but warm, and his blue eyes were shining and unreadable, and for a very long moment, Anthony found he could not breathe at all.

~*~

~* After: Mount Coronus, the Supplicant's Seat, third night. *~

~*~

"And that," said the knight, briskly knotting off the linen strip and tucking the end beneath Tony's palm, "is how you splint broken fingers." She smiled at him then with her lips full and red, and her dark eyes wickedly merry, and Anthony found himself utterly indifferent to it.

"Thank you," he told the girl as she rose, brushing dust from her knees and bottom. She was teasing him, he knew, but he was far too weary to imagine rising to it. "Where is Brother Steven?"

"It is nearly matins, Initiate, you should rest. Gather your strength for the dawn."

"I have been gathering my strength for nearly three days now," he grizzled, getting her the last of the crumbling bread from his pack. "Each time I think I've got it all, one of you lot comes and knocks it out of me. The least you could do is tell me when he will come and knock out the rest... If he will come at all."

She looked at him for a moment, pity soft in her eyes as she nibbled politely at his offering. Then she looked off to the east, across the long sweep of the Kingdom, to where the silver was just beginning to prick the horizon. "I must go," she told him, bending to gather up the remnants of her 'lesson'. "Sunrise brings strong winds in the heights, and as you know, the climb to the Supplicant's Seat is quite steep. It would be foolish of me to be caught upon the descent when they arise."

"Please." The word slipped out so easily, as if he had never once in his life struggled with it, but it did him no good, for the girl merely tied her purse in place and went on as if he had never spoken.

"One can be swept away if one is incautious, they say." And then she was gone, away down the steep carved steps, leaving Anthony alone with nothing more than sore muscles, broken fingers, and a teasing wink as she slipped from view.

Anthony slid awkwardly to the ground once she was gone, feeling exhausted, sorry for himself, and watching the sky fade to blue by gradual degrees. Fifteen knights had come in the two days and three nights since Anthony had put on the great waist-shackle with its loose tethering chains, let Doctor Banner slot the lock home and watched him walk away into the twilight. Fifteen of them; some to talk, some to scold, some to mock, some to beat him to the ground and explain to him his error, and some to teach him how to bandage his broken fingers. One, a thin, scholarly man with no discernible expression to either face or voice, had sat for two hours, insisting Anthony tell him everything he remembered about King Howard.

That had been particularly excruciating.

Anthony had asked every one of them about Steven, but he'd got nothing for his pains but a few pitying looks, a few smirks, and a cryptic remark or two. Now, three days from his last memory of food, sleep, or comfort, Anthony was at last beginning to lose hope. Not that Steven was alive – that, he knew must be so, for his visitors would surely have told him so if it were not -- but his hope that he might be forgiven, or at least allowed to make his amends was barely keeping alight. On the third sunrise, his vigil would be over, one way or another.

He set his back against the stone and began again the litany that had kept him company between challenges once his store of lamp oil had burnt away. "I judged you weak," he said when the sky paled to silver and mist crept in long fingers in the valleys below. "I judged you frail and soft when you have been nothing but strong, resilient, stubborn -- dear Mother of Stars, Steven, you are so very stubborn -- and steady. You have always been stronger than I, but I refused to see it, and in my vanity, I dishonored you."

"I stole your place aboard the _Scutum_ ," he said when the sky began to blush amber and rose, and birds awoke in the forest to chorus the dawn. "You served the Queen as nobly as any of your order, knight, nun, or monk, and I kept you from her side when your reason, your gentleness might have... saved him." If he'd still had wine then, Anthony would have drunk it, and damn the vigil for a farce. But he'd underestimated his challengers, and the jugs had not lasted halfway through his first day. The last three to come had brought weak, sweet wine to share with _him_ , but that was little comfort now.

"I missed you," he said when the sun cracked the horizon into fire and the promised wind began to buffet the mountainside around him. "I missed you, and I mourned for you, and yet like a coward, I did not come back for you. I hid myself in politics and playing Regent, and pretended it all mattered, when really... I could not think of how to –" 

A gust of wind caught the words from his throat, whirled them along with dust, leaves, and lime around the outcropping. Below the bare spike of stone, the trees thrashed and rattled. With stung, streaming eyes, Anthony watched the birds race for the open sky as the dust billowed, choking-thick about him. The wind keened again – a sound with teeth -- the falling shadow was more warning than he needed.

He lunged for the Starkiller and struggled up to his feet as the dragon, blue as starry midnight, his silver horn spikes sun-pricked and blazing, drew up hard, bating to hover for a long moment in the air above the Traitor's Throne. Anthony stared at the beast, horrified, hopeful, throat seized too tight to breathe, too tight to pray. This was not the Avenger – could not _be_ the Avenger, for his great, flexing breast bore no scar above his heart, his right brow ridge un-scored, the eye beneath it bright and fiercely clear, and Anthony had _seen_ the Avenger crash bleeding, dying into the sea and he had _not come out again!_

It could not be the Avenger come to avenge himself... but it was still a dragon, and as it stroked the air with mighty wings, Anthony realized with a shock that despite the guilt, despite the shame, despite the fear that had haunted him this past year -- he really and truly did not want to die. 

He couldn't die. Not when he hadn't seen Steven yet.

"Come on!" he heard himself shout, wrenching the Starkiller loose of its lead sheath and dropping into a garde that ached to his marrow. "I have killed your kind before! COME ON!"

And then with a snarl, the dragon folded its wings and dropped from the sky.

~*~

~* Before: Mount Coronus, Monastery of the Brothers of St. Erskine, refectory. *~

~*~

"Have you ever seen it?" He nodded at the tapestry of the great blue dragon that hung at the end of the monastery's dining hall. It was crudely rendered, as if copied poorly out of some old text; rough wool in home-dyed hues stitched into more of the same without a trace of silk or silver to gleam in the highlights. A novice might have done it to stave off boredom in long winter nights, assuming she'd nothing to read and no other work to do. But still there was something loving in the extravagance of the work; overblown and awkward as a whole, but with a stealthy elegance in the careful angles of the stitches that make up each scale and silvery horn.

"See it every mealtime," Steven said without looking up. "It's hung there for ages." When Anthony kicked his boot, he only grinned and stole his bread.

"Merciful Mother, where _do_ you put it?" Anthony grizzled, shoving the rest of his soup toward the monk as well. "One would think, with the amount you eat, that you might do us all the courtesy of putting on a little flesh. And anyway I _meant,_ have you ever seen the dragon itself."

Steven shook his head, the mischief in his eyes going wistful. "Never, though I have often wished to. They say he is a splendid sight." Then he poked at the soup, and cut an unreadable glance Anthony's way. "Have _you_ seen the Avenger?"

He nodded, reaching for the pitcher and topping up his beer. "It was... terrible."

"Terrible?" A flash of what could only be hurt surfaced in the monk's eyes, but he smoothed it quickly away. "How so?"

"Well for one, he is not so large as he's made out to be," Anthony nodded toward the tapestry, where the dragon held a three-masted airship in one claw like an eagle might hold a hare. "He could never do that, for example."

"Of course not," Steven agreed. "Nothing so large as that could den unseen on this mountain. But he is still...?"

"Oh yes. Enormous, but quick and nimble in the air for all that. He flies low, barely skims the trees with his wings, so that when he stoops, it's like an eagle plucking fish from the sea, not a hawk pouncing on a hare." he stabbed his knife into the bread by way of demonstration. "Thus he can pluck a brigand from his horse, then turn upon himself like an eel and come over again before the rest of the troop can scatter." Anthony shivered, remembering the screams of horses and men, and the futile crack of shot that either missed its mark, or bounced harmlessly off the midnight hide. 

Steven tapped his hand, and when Anthony looked up from his memories, the monk's eyes were all grave concern. "He did not menace _you_ , surely -- you, who are his ally?"

"Steven, until first I saw the beast, I had never seen _any_ dragon outside a book or ornament. Not live, dead, whole or in part, and I was beginning to believe the breed extinct. And so when the bloody great thing came smashing into the cannon battery that day, I will confess my first thought was not 'Ah, here is the Great Avenger, we are saved!'" Anthony grimaced into his beer. "More like 'Dread Mother, where can I hide?'"

A snort, and Steven jostled him reaching for the beer pitcher. "You did not hide." At Anthony's challenging eyebrow, he shrugged and grinned. "You are far too vain to have hidden. Not once you saw him strike your enemies down. You'd have seized the distraction for advantage, and routed the fleeing brigands with nothing more than clever quips and your dashing good looks."

"You..." Anthony set down his mug, pressing one hand to his chest as his mouth dropped open wide. "You think I am dashing?" 

"Hush," Steven hissed, cheeks blazing as his eyes flicked furtive glances at the tables around them. 

"I will not be still!" Anthony cried, catching the monk's narrow shoulders in his hands and turning him square-on for a smacking, sloppy, struggling kiss. "I cannot be still! Oh, my heart, how can I quell my joy, knowing that Brother Steven the Illuminator finds me-"

And that was when Archivist Coulson upended the beer pitcher over Anthony's head.

~*~

~* After: Mount Coronus, the Supplicant's Seat, third dawn. *~

~*~

 

And then, between the roar of challenge and the attack, the dragon was simply gone. 

And when the dawn wind swirled away the thick dust of its landing, Anthony saw a man where the great beast had been. Naked, shimmering with scale and horn, yellow haired, with ice blue eyes that caught light, but no warmth from the sunrise as he turned -- he was as beautiful and as terrible upon two bare feet as he'd been upon wide blue wings.

It was a long, frozen moment before Anthony could manage a word. And when he did, the word he managed made absolutely no sense at all.

"Steven," he croaked, which was ridiculous, because the man – the dead man, the Paladin, whom Anthony had _killed_ \-- towered over him like a wall of scale and horn and muscle and claws that scraped the worn stones with each heavy, deliberate step. The Paladin was a looming grudge, cold-eyed and pitiless, as terrifying in his calm as the dragon had been in rage, and yet... and yet.

"Anthony," he answered the greeting with a terse nod.

Something loosened, hot and sloppy and desperately joyful in Anthony's guts, he could barely drag a desperate breath in around it. "You... You're..." He lurched forward a step, heart thrashing at its cage of crystal and bone until the rattle of his chains drew him up short, reminding him of why he had come. "Have you-" He choked, dust and shock thick in his throat for a moment. Then he squeezed the tears from his eyes and tried again. "Have you come to kill me?" 

The Paladin did not smile. "No," He said, and translucent scales glimmered across his face like mica in the sunlight, fading away even as Anthony watched. He aimed a nod at the humming sword, dull, hungry, and forgotten in Anthony's hand, and asked, "Have you?"

Anthony stooped, caught up the Starkiller's sheath from where he'd dropped it, and then jammed the sword in without thought for its struggles. Then he turned in place and hurled it as far as he could, meaning to see it sail over the edge of the Traitor's Throne and off into the gap -- where neither of them need ever see it, or remember the feel of it, the gleeful sound it made when punching through scale and flesh and bone. In that moment, no matter that his grandfather's blade had saved his life, and probably Pepper's and half the knights' lives as well when he put it between them and the maddened Avenger, Anthony never wanted to see the damned thing again. 

But he was weary, hungry and tipsy for want of sleep, and his broken hand could not grip as it should, and so instead of winging out into space, the sword slipped free to grind and spin along the cut, its lead sheath smearing dark and soft along the paler stone. Out of his reach, at least. Anthony decided it was far enough, and turned back to search the Paladin's wary scowl for the man he'd come to find.

It was all there, plain to see, now Anthony knew to look for it. The bones of cheek and jaw were not merely _similar_ beneath the Paladin's thicker muscle, they were the same. While the Paladin's forehead bristled with an elegant, symmetrical pattern of gleaming horn, the brows beneath it knit in Steven's too-stern expression of forbidding disapproval. The ears, crowned along the backward curve with spines, and thin vanes of flesh, still stood from his head at exactly the same awkward angle as the ones Anthony used to entertain himself by tickling when Steven fell asleep over his books. 

"You never would remove your helm," Anthony said, inane as he watched the last trace of glimmering dragonscale fade from the Paladin's face. Only the horn buds and the spines on his ears remained to hint at the beast within. "Not once in all those battles... These marks do not leave you, do they? Not until you let it all go, and become just a man." 

The Paladin huffed annoyance, then unfolded his arms to reveal the broad swell of his chest unblemished, as was his face, by any trace of scar. He reached out to tap a claw against Anthony's cuirass, so it pinged like a bell. "Did you come here for a fight?" he asked, all challenging eyebrow.

And while Anthony considered replying that he'd already got several fights, whether he'd come looking for them or no, he settled instead for removing his armor, each segment uncoupled and set aside as briskly as his splinted, shaking fingers could manage. It was not easy with the great shackle around his waist in his way, but if Steven wanted him vulnerable, helpless, humbled, then Anthony would give him that, and be grateful. 

"Steven," his clothing was stiff, sweat rank and damp from three days and nights in armor, but it wasn't the early wind that put the shiver in Anthony's voice as he set the last of it aside. "Steven, I am so-" 

A touch on his lips, one smooth finger, the claw just tickling his mustache, stilled him. "Anthony." He had stepped close, the heat from his skin was basking-warm. The finger smoothed along his lip then turned, so the claw hooked safely away as he dragged it upward along Anthony's cheek to the coronet resting on his brow. "You cannot be a prince here."

Anthony snatched the thing from his head, startling a ragged yelp from himself as he caught and yanked free some hair as well. He thought about throwing that away too, half turned, arm coiled to do so before a grip on his elbow stayed him, reminded him of why he'd bothered to bring the stupid thing in the first place. He spun then, pressed the circlet at the Paladin's chest, not quite above his heart and said, "Yours, Steven. I brought it to give to you."

That, at last, won a smile; soft with fond surprise, and Anthony felt his breath hitch to see it. Steven closed his fingers over the coronet and gave his head one slow shake. "I never wanted it," he said, and leaned down to set it with the rest of the armor. 

When he stood upright again, Anthony kissed him. 

He had not planned to do it – had not thought he'd dare to do it, even then he had imagined his thin, slight friend coming to him upon the rock, but the gentleness in Steven's voice mixed with the hope he had thought burnt out in his breast, and between one breath and the next, he found that he simply couldn't _not_ kiss the man. And then, as Steven's lurch of shock gave way to a deep, hungry rumble, a grappling of arms, and a sidelong tilt that slotted their lips into perfect, open welcome, Anthony found he couldn't make himself stop. Or really care.

He did not feel the shift, exactly, only when the kiss broke apart so they could sob cool, sweet air into the space between them, everything was different. The body pressed to his was wiry and slight now, up-tilted face thinner, softer without its crown of scale and horn. Anthony brushed at his ear with one thumb, loving at once how the touch made Steven's blue eyes go hooded and fierce. 

"There you are..." he murmured, and stole another brief kiss. "I had feared you would not come."

"Me too," Steven replied, his hands strong, and anything but shy as they mapped the lines of Anthony's back through the damp linen of his arming tunic. "And then when you came, I thought you might not stay."

"Chains," Anthony admitted with a chuckle. "They make it hard to leave."

Steven's laugh was a burst of heat against his throat, and he shook his head. "Idiot. The ordeal's meant for you to prove yourself because it's your will to be so proven, not because you cannot escape."

"I am not an idiot." Anthony claimed one more kiss as proof of the point. "I did not _want_ to escape. Not until I had seen you, and begged your-"

Steven's finger pressed his apology away again. "I cannot absolve you, Anthony," he said, solemn and lovely in the golden light. "I never blamed you for it – not for anything you had to do. I have nothing I can forgive you..." And there, a smile broke through. "Except possibly that you took so damned long coming home. Idiot."

"Coward," Anthony corrected fondly, then added, all nonchalance, "Home?"

"Home," Steven agreed with a shiver. "I want a bath, and you _need_ one."

"Mother of Stars, yes please," Anthony sighed, stepping back with a rattle and clank, and turning to present the shackle's clasp. "A bath, a bed, and something to eat, in any particular order, so long as it's quick... Well?" he prompted when Steven did not move. "Are you going to get me out of this vile thing?" 

"Oh, certainly," Steven said, arch and amused. "Soon as you tell me where you've put the key."

"What do you mean, where _I've_ put the key?" Anthony inquired with calm, rational decorum that sounded nothing at all like a yelp. "It's _your_ damned vigil..." Steven raised an eyebrow, and Anthony's heart abruptly began to sink. "Your vigil. Which... never involved chains and shackles at all... because the initiate is meant to prove himself..."

"Because it is his will to be proven," Steven finished with him, only just managing not to smile.

"And that means it was my royal bastard of a father who had damned things made and put here," Anthony went on with a groan. "And _that_ means the one who had the key was almost certainly the mother-cursed Chancellor, and because the stars of my birth were clearly _laughing at the time_ , the bastard most likely had it _with_ him when his creation blasted him to bits!" 

That was when Steven lost his battle against laughing aloud. "You... you chained yourself here... without knowing where the...! You are _mad!_ "

"I _know_ where the key is," Anthony ground, craning his neck for a better look at the shackle's hasp. "It's at the Palace... all right, it's _under_ the Palace," he admitted, just to watch Steven fold over in giggles. "If you hurry up, you can get it and be back in time for lunch. I'll want roast capon, by the way, with plenty of bread and good cheese... and you are not going to find any of that in my bags, Steven, leave those alone and pay attention! We need help!"

"We need," Steven countered, his skinny shoulders gleaming, flexing like wings in the long-slanting sunlight as he dug through the bags Anthony had brought, "some patience and a bit of thick wire. And you always have wire, at least... ah." He grinned, and Anthony lost the power of speech for a few seconds watching the light gild his body, all angle and bone and smooth, fair skin as he returned and dropped to his knees at Anthony's feet.

"Do you trust me?" he asked with a knowing smirk that softened into a pleased blush at Anthony's befuddled nod. "That's... that's good," he said, and began slotting the wires into the lock. "Because the Paladin could probably tear this off of you if you wanted me to change, but...?" He stopped, looked up in surprise as Anthony's hand curled around his shoulder, thumb just dipping into the elegant notch where Steven's clavicles winged together.

"I don't," Anthony said, helpless to resist the smile that was spreading across his face like dawn across the sky. "I don't want you to change. I want you exactly like this." The confession pressed out of him, he was too tired, hungry, sore... too overcome to resist it. "I always did." He stared his fill, surrendering the last of his poise and dignity to the benediction he'd come back to Ironheight to find. He did not miss it – he was too busy marveling at how Steven's naked skin could be so very warm in this high, cold place; how his eyes could look so wide, so young in his face, and yet at once so very wise; how the lush weight of his lip could quirk up, wry, amused, and still somehow kind. 

And Steven, with a roll of his eyes that was at once amused, aggravated, and adoring, shook his head and bent back to his wires, saying, "I know."


End file.
